Under the Boardwalk

- Carly Phillips's "The Bachelor (Warner Books paperback, 7/02) hit #5 on the "New York Times and "USA TODAY bestseller lists, #2 on the "Publishers Weekly list, was a "Reading with Ripa" book club selection on ABC TV's "LIVE with Regis and Kelly, and has sold over 368,000 copies.- "The Playboy (Warner Forever paperback, 1/03), the second book in her Chandler series, was on the "New York Times bestseller list for three weeks, landing as high as #10, hit #13 on the "USA TODAY bestseller list, and has over 456,000 copies in print.- "The Heartbreaker, the final book in the trilogy, published in Warner hardcover in 8/03 with a first printing of 66,000 copies, will be published in Warner mass market in 6/04.- Carly Phillips is also the author of several Harlequin Temptation and Harlequin Blaze romances.

"Ariana Costas, the heroine of Phillips's (The Heartbreaker, etc.) featherweight confection, is a Jersey girl with a wacky family who quickly gets caught up in some potentially dangerous hijinks. Sound familiar? Despite the parallels, Ariana is no Stephanie Plum. Rather, she's a confused, repressed psychology professor who feels like a misfit in her family of eccentrics. But when she learns that her twin sister, Zoe, has gone missing, she reluctantly returns to her family home just outside of Atlantic City. Shortly thereafter, she's shot at and saved by gorgeous undercover police detective Quinn Donovan, who tells her, in no uncertain terms, that Zoe is fine and that she should hightail it out of town for her sister's safety and her own. Instead, Ariana decides to don Zoe's miniskirt and do some sleuthing at the casino where Zoe worked. When Ariana isn't poking around the casino or heating up the pages with Quinn, she's trying to talk some sense into her parents, a pair of lovable Addams family look-alikes who are plotting their next money-making scheme. Phillips's passive prose prevents her protagonists from growing beyond their prescribed roles, and her ham-handed humor contributes little to the story (Ariana's family owns a monkey named Spank, which naturally leads to exchanges like this one — Ariana: 'Spank who?'; her mother: 'Spank the monkey!'). Nevertheless, Phillips's tale is loaded with enough sexual pyrotechnics to light a fire under her fans. Agent, Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media. (June 8)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Phillips returns with a delightfully saucy new novel about twin sisters--and the delicious trouble that ensues when one is mistaken for the other.