With Friends Like These - Hardcover

Coleridge, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312170661 ISBN 13: 9780312170660

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 1997

Synopsis

When a beautiful but treacherous investigative journalist is found murdered in her apartment, the long list of suspects leads inside the magazine industry, where the truth becomes just another commodity to be bought and sold.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholas Coleridge is the Managing Director of Conde Nast Publications Ltd. in London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Take-no-prisoners whodunit set in the British magazine industry, from Cond Nast's London-based managing director. Beginning with a disclaimer warning that this is no mean roman clef, first-novelist Coleridge (Paper Tigers, not reviewed) delivers precisely that--a gossipy, downright trashy schmaltzspiel that celebrates the high-pressure sleaziness of media-driven consumer culture. Coleridge's stand-in is Kit Preston, a divorced, 40-something ber-editor of four dreadfully tony newsstand slicks, who works off the tension, not to mention the calories, of wine-drenched expense-account lunches by roller-blading with his current inamorata, Anna Grant, a sexpot journalist whose peerless savagings of the rich and famous have made her almost, but not quite, as celebrated as her current subjects: a fading society tramp who's in the process of divorcing her Eurotrash husband, and a debonair but shady Pacific Rim businessman who sold arms to the Viet Cong. After a carpet-bombing of big names (Brad Pitt's magazine covers don't sell as well as Uma Thurmond's) and brand names (``smells like Givenchy, bottle like Obsession, packaging like Tresor''), followed by a Cristal-soaked dinner with Preston's boss, Chicago supermarket magnate and plastic-straw manufacturer Barney Weiss, Anna is found strangled. Tormented by suspicious cops, baseless innuendo, anonymous attackers, fatuously wealthy vulgarians, and a libel suit that simply won't go away, Preston is pitched from his imperial post and must somehow unmask Anna's murderer among a vogues' gallery of despicable media and fashion industry types. Coleridge's simmering insider dish--less a novel than an autobiographical venting of spleen--too rapidly cools to a brittle crust. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0312170661
• ISBN 13: 9780312170660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384