This book is pretty horrible.

The whole plot - girl wakes up from a coma and has to solve the murder of her mother - is completely side-lined in favour of creepy statutory-rape level romance and some random "friends" forcing the protagonist to put on make-up before she's even out of her hospital bed because "Naked faces are not in!" and aggressively bullying her into unnecessary make-overs. Meanwhile the crime is solved when our heroine goes to a party and just happens to bump into the murderer.

An anti-climactic waste of a set-up that only served to let me know how much Lowery Nixon hates women.

The cardinal sin committed by this book is that it’s just too boring. If you’re going to be a trash read, then be a trash read. This is basically 400 pages explaining how a rich woman bought a shop and then hired some fashion and sales experts to make it a success, followed by 200 pages detailing how a film producer produced a film. Which is all fair enough, but hardly riveting.

Also, the sexual politics are horrifying, the casual racism is pervasive, the sex scenes are downright unpleasant and there’s a lot of aggressive homophobia. There’s also a surfeit of chauvinistic, domineering men who claim to love women but actually fetishise and belittle them. Also it takes an inordinate amount of time to reach a very traditional conclusion, with the status quo being maintained and everyone making exactly the choices they would be expected to make.

However there is some not-bad writing buried in here somewhere, so I’m giving it 2 stars.