Review: The St Tropez Lonely Hearts Club by Joan Collins

Collins' latest novel features a poor but gorgeous Argentine girl being wooed by a handsome playboy, whose full psychopathic cruelty is revealed once they’re married—with her years of misery ending only when he dies in a bizarre sex-related accident. And that’s just the first 25 pages.

After that, things take a turn for the action-packed, as a large cast of rich and/or beautiful characters party their way through summer in the South of France. The only trouble is that they also seem to be the targets for a serial killer…

The result, needless to say, is shamelessly over-the-top. Yet, at 82, Dame Joan remains such a force of nature that asking her to tone it down a bit would be like asking a hurricane to blow more gently.

She also has a fair amount of teasing fun at what seems to be her own expense—one character, for example, is an elderly former starlet who needs three hours with her “glam squad” before appearing in public.

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