Only veteran author Danielle Steel can make dysfunction this fashionable! In Malice, her 37th potboiler, the gloves come off. Life is no fairy tale for teenager Grace Adams. The preternaturally quiet and dowdy daughter of Watseka's favorite son, lawyer John Adams, and his lovely, cancer-stricken wife Ellen, Grace has an ugly little secret that she's kept for four years. When her father brutally rapes her following her mother's funeral, Grace kills him. Only 17 years old, she faces the death penalty in a town all too willing to perpetrate the fiction of John Adams, even when it means prison for Grace. Upon release two years later, Grace heads for Chicago where life starts looking up when she finds a job as a receptionist in a downtown modeling agency. Unfortunately, Grace encounters an unscrupulous photographer and a slimy parole officer. As soon as her parole is over, Grace escapes again, running to New York City to disappear among the hordes. Working as a secretary in a law firm, she's asked to work for a partner. After a rocky start, Charles Mackenzie and Grace establish a comfortable routine. But when Grace is brutally beaten by the husband of a woman in the crisis center where she volunteers, Charles is at her side constantly, arranging for the finest medical care and talking her out of her coma. Love blooms as Grace slowly recuperates. Finally whole again, inside and out, Grace and Charles marry and start a family. Life couldn't get much better as Charles enters politics and Grace tends to their growing family. But when tabloids release the story of Grace's sordid past and explicit photos of Grace taken while she was drugged, their family is left reeling, with Charles's campaign in shambles and Grace's life crumbling around her. Danielle Steel doesn't even pretend that Malice is a piece of romantic fiction, but loyal fans will happily make the transition as she charts a new course! --Alison Trinkle


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 his daughter, with his wife's help, for four gruesome years. Grace refuses; Dad rapes; Grace shoots Dad while he's still inside her. Grace goes to prison, where she's raped by a big blond inmate named Brenda. Dazed and confused, Grace, having served her sentence, tries to make a quiet, sexless life for herself, volunteering several nights a week at a shelter for battered women. But she is abused by a sleazy parole officer, a lecherous photographer, and then, outside the shelter, the piece de resistance: she's beaten within an inch of her life. Then she finds true love. What can be said? This is one ugly little book. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Steel returns (after last year's Five Days in Paris) with yet another tale of suffering and redemption (this time, perhaps, with a personal edge to it, reflecting Steel's reaction to an unauthorized 1994 biography). Grace Adams overcomes, in the patented Steel manner, a series of almost biblical-level adversities. As an adolescent Grace had been repeatedly molested by her father. If she didn't submit, he would beat her mother, then dying of bone cancer. After the funeral, in a particularly violent encounter, Grace, now 17, kills him in self-defense. With almost no one to believe her story, since Dad was beloved by everybody in their small Illinois town, Grace goes to prison for two years. When she's released, she is harassed by a sleazy probation officer and drugged by a smarmy photographer, who produces some compromising photographs of the encounter. She eventually escapes to New York and gets a job at a law firm. She also volunteers at a battered-women's center, where she is attacked and brutally beaten by the husband of a woman she had tried to help. Recuperating at Bellevue, the ever-resilient Grace finds Charles, her wealthy boss, at her bedside. (``It was so unfair,'' he thinks. ``She was so young, and so alive, and so pretty.'') Inevitably, they marry, have children, and lead a perfect Steel- like existence. But when Charles runs for the US Senate, reporters uncover Grace's past. The media savage them, and Grace has a miscarriage. Steel, who was herself recently manhandled in a biography that dwelt on Steel's harsh childhood and on her marriages to two convicted felons, gets her own back against the ``maliciousness'' of the press (``They went for the gut every time with a stiletto''). There is an improbable, and typically upbeat, d‚nouement. Once again, Steel's incantational style, a melodic and slightly hypnotic current, carries the reader swiftly through a string of god-awful clich‚s, outrageous events, and unlikely outcomes. For the devotee only. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

In her 37th novel, Danielle Steel tells the compelling story of a woman who must struggle to overcome a shattering betrayal--and the cruelest kind of malice. Sexually abused on the night of her mother's funeral, 17-year-old Grace Adams surprises everyone when she will not reveal the identity of her attacker. Years later, after a lifetime of being a victim, Grace has happiness within her grasp, but a vicious tabloid and an enemy from her past threaten to destroy everything she has struggled to gain.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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. From 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, 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 bent on malice at all costs.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A beautiful woman survives misfortune only to find her happy marriage threatened by an unscrupulous press. A 10-week PW bestseller. (June)

Library Journal

This darker-than-usual tale from Steel tells of a battered woman who runs from her past. On-sale date: April 10.

BookList - Donna Seaman

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 his daughter, with his wife's help, for four gruesome years. Grace refuses; Dad rapes; Grace shoots Dad while he's still inside her. Grace goes to prison, where she's raped by a big blond inmate named Brenda. Dazed and confused, Grace, having served her sentence, tries to make a quiet, sexless life for herself, volunteering several nights a week at a shelter for battered women. But she is abused by a sleazy parole officer, a lecherous photographer, and then, outside the shelter, the piece de resistance: she's beaten within an inch of her life. Then she finds true love. What can be said? This is one ugly little book.

Kirkus Reviews

Steel returns (after last year's Five Days in Paris) with yet another tale of suffering and redemption (this time, perhaps, with a personal edge to it, reflecting Steel's reaction to an unauthorized 1994 biography).

Grace Adams overcomes, in the patented Steel manner, a series of almost biblical-level adversities. As an adolescent Grace had been repeatedly molested by her father. If she didn't submit, he would beat her mother, then dying of bone cancer. After the funeral, in a particularly violent encounter, Grace, now 17, kills him in self-defense. With almost no one to believe her story, since Dad was beloved by everybody in their small Illinois town, Grace goes to prison for two years. When she's released, she is harassed by a sleazy probation officer and drugged by a smarmy photographer, who produces some compromising photographs of the encounter. She eventually escapes to New York and gets a job at a law firm. She also volunteers at a battered-women's center, where she is attacked and brutally beaten by the husband of a woman she had tried to help. Recuperating at Bellevue, the ever-resilient Grace finds Charles, her wealthy boss, at her bedside. ("It was so unfair," he thinks. "She was so young, and so alive, and so pretty.") Inevitably, they marry, have children, and lead a perfect Steel- like existence. But when Charles runs for the US Senate, reporters uncover Grace's past. The media savage them, and Grace has a miscarriage. Steel, who was herself recently manhandled in a biography that dwelt on Steel's harsh childhood and on her marriages to two convicted felons, gets her own back against the "maliciousness" of the press ("They went for the gut every time with a stiletto"). There is an improbable, and typically upbeat, dénouement.

Once again, Steel's incantational style, a melodic and slightly hypnotic current, carries the reader swiftly through a string of god-awful clichés, outrageous events, and unlikely outcomes. For the devotee only.