Title: "The Lives of Danielle Steel"
Authors: Vickie L. Bane and Lorenzo Benet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Length, price: 307 pages, $22.95 Best-selling novelist Danielle Steel has turned out book after book after book for decades. Each is more popular than the last. They are tales of the rich and famous, cheap and sleazy, the strong, the weak, the lovelorn.
As Vickie L. Bane and Lorenzo Benet show in this unauthorized biography, truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to Ms. Steel's life. Her first and fourth marriages are what one might expect -- to men from society families.
But Danielle Steel's second and third husbands were substance-abusing felons who continued their criminal ways during their marriage to the author.
Ms. Steel's second husband, Danny Zugelder, could not adapt to Ms. Steel's intense work habits when she was working on a book. His drinking fueled more conflict, and after he was convicted of raping a woman, Ms. Steel divorced him.
Her third husband, Bill Toth, was working for a moving company she hired. He was living in a halfway house after his release from prison.
The authors spend too much time on the conflicts with Zugelder and Toth. Information on her more recent life, her seven birth children and two stepchildren, is culled almost entirely from magazine articles, since few of Ms. Steel's friends or relatives would speak to the authors.
Our hero in Dick Francis' "Wild Horses" is Thomas Lyon, a film director who finds he must do much more than finish a picture. Lyon hears the deathbed confession of an old friend, a blacksmith turned columnist -- a confession of a killing. In his delirium, the dying man believes Lyon is a priest, and goes to his eternal reward calmly; but the revelation has precisely the opposite effect on Lyon, who finds himself ensnared in a mystery.
The film itself is based on a best-selling novel about a mysterious death. The wife of Jackson Wells, a horse trainer, hanged herself years earlier, apparently after an affair. The novelist, one of the book's nastier but more memorable characters, is also the screenwriter. With a movie as backdrop, Mr. Francis has license to give the reader a fine assortment of players, including the mega-star and a producer.
As always, Mr. Francis is at his best when summing up people and situations in a few, impeccably chosen words. "Wild Horses" will delight the author's legion of fans.