Malice

Product Description In her 37th bestselling novel, Danielle Steel tells the compelling story of a woman who must struggle to overcome a shattering betrayal, and the cruelest kind of malice.At seventeen, the night of her mother's funeral, Grace Adams is attacked. It is not the first time, and a brutal crime ensues.And to everyone's horror, Grace will not tell the truth. She is a young woman with secrets too horrible to tell, with hurts so deep they may never heal. She is also beautiful enough for men to want her no matter how much she does not want them. Whatever the outcome, Grace Adams will have to live with whatever happened during those terrible years. After a lifetime of being a victim, now she must pay the price for other people's sins.From the depths of an Illinois women's prison to a Chicago modeling agency to a challenging career in New York, Grace must carry the past with her wherever she goes. And in healing her own pain, she reaches out to battered women and children who live a nightmare she knows all too well.When Grace meets Charles Mackenzie, a New York lawyer, she has found a man who wants nothing from her-except to heal her, to hear her secrets, and to give her the family she so desperately wants. But, with happiness finally within her grasp, and precious loved ones to protect, Grace is at her most vulnerable-in danger of losing everything to a vicious tabloid press and an enemy from her past, an enemy bent on malice at all costs.With rare insight and power, Danielle Steel writes this extraordinary woman's story, portraying her struggle to triumph over malice and betrayal, and to transform a lifetime of pain into a blessing for others. Revealing both the stark reality of domestic abuse and the healing power of love, Malice, is more than superb fiction. It is a piece of life. From Publishers Weekly Sexual abuse in myriad forms imbues Steel's new novel with uncharacteristically dark tones. The narrative covers more than 20 painful years in the life of Grace Adams, an incest victim who, at age 17, shoots dead her abusive father. Sent to prison, Grace is rescued from a lesbian gang-rape by a pair of women who provide protection during her two-year sentence. Once released, she heads to Chicago, where she lands a job in a modeling agency, only to be sexually harassed by a series of men, including her parole officer, her boss and a wicked photographer. After her probation ends, Grace moves to New York; there, she works as secretary in a major law firm and volunteers in a shelter for abused women. Steel is careful not to let the nearly fatal beating that follows mar her heroine's good looks, or future. Grace emerges from a coma to find handsome Charles Mackenzie, her high-powered lawyer boss, at her bedside. A happy ending?which follows some satisfying vengeance on Grace's part?doesn't minimize the aura of victimization that surrounds this heroine. Only in a Danielle Steel novel would a 19-year-old ex-con show up at her first job interview in a "little Chanel knockoff" suit?but neither pseudo-high fashion nor the high-handed conclusion keep this yarn from being, ultimately, a big downer that earns its title in more ways than one. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This darker-than-usual tale from Steel tells of a battered woman who runs from her past. On-sale date: April 10.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Steel's wheels keep on turning. The count is 37 novels, all megasellers. And the queen of the easy read still manages to vary her tabloid-based formula. Lately, she's constructed heartrending plots of suffering and redemption around such touching subjects as middle-aged love and disease; here she's gone hard-core. Grace Adams, a shy 17-year-old beauty, has just come home from her mother's funeral, and dad, a good-looking, much revered, small-town attorney, a pillar of society if you will, wants what he's been getting from