Sizzle — Barbara Brett

"" A] battle fraught with...the dirtiest of tricks...the stuff that destroys marriages, people, lives.... Sizzle through the summer with Sizzle.""--The Salem News

It's the glitzy1980s. Fortunes are being made and lost--and made again. Wall Street is on a roll. One after another, corporations are being gobbled up by rapacious raiders. And now Sizzle, the most glamorous and profitable magazine in the world is up for grabs. British media mogul and corporate raider Harrison Kendricks has set his sights on this publishing plum, in which the reputations of the rich, the famous, and the beautiful can be built or destroyed with a paragraph or a photograph. He has never before lost a hostile takeover. But then he has never before been in competition with Marietta Wylford, the brilliant and beautiful CEO of Wylford Enterprises. She needs only Sizzle to crown the business empire she has built with nothing but her own genius and ambition, and she is determined to let no one stand in her way. Not even the mysterious and dangerous Harrison Kendricks.

Marietta Wylford was not always at the top of New York's business and social worlds. Born into poverty, she was only sixteen when her browbeaten mother died of overwork, and her brutal, alcoholic father abandoned her. But if fate had thrust her into such desperate circumstances, it had also given her the means to escape them: a brilliant mind, a beautiful face, and a figure most women would die for. She used them all to blaze her way to the top. One by one, she had always been able to foil those who dared try to topple her from her pinnacle.

But Harrison Kendricks is different. They are two of a kind. Creatures who have fashioned themselves in the image of their own wants and needs. Neither has ever lost a battle in the boardroom--or the bedroom. To defeat him, she will have to uncover the one vile secret that will utterly destroy him. And she will do anything to get it--even at the risk of breaking her own heart.

Sizzle--a novel of breathtaking power and ambition, set against the jet-setting worlds of Paris, the Riviera, San Francisco, and Manhattan's elite