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Summary
Summary
The Stars Shine Down is Sidney Sheldons twelfth and most passionate novel, set against the glamorous world of international business and featuring a complex and compelling heroine faced with a series of life-shattering decisions.
Lara Cameron is young and beautiful. Rising from a past she seeks to repress, she achieves her wildest ambition, creating a much envied business empire. Then, overnight, all that has gone before, her fortune, her achievements, and her marriageeverythingis at risk.
Paul Martin, a brilliant but mysterious lawyer who is captivated by Lara, finally is faced with her desire for independence and his own compulsion no to let her go.
Howard Keller, Laras longtime friend and mentor, is torn between loyalty to her and maintaining a terrifying secret, one that must never be revealedespecially to Lara.
It is Philip Adler who offers Lara an exciting new world, but at a devastating price that threatens to destroy them both.
From Scotland to Nova Scotia, New York to London, Rome to Reno, The Stars Shine Down is classic Sidney Sheldon, featuring the startling shocks and amazing surprises millions of readers have come to expect and love. It is also a highlight in a continuum of virtuoso performances by the man everyone turns to for irresistible romance, cliff-hanger suspense, and the totally unexpected.
Author Notes
Born in Chicago on February 11, 1917, Sidney Sheldon entered Northwestern University on a scholarship in 1935, but was soon forced to drop out due to the Depression. He went to Manhattan in hopes of becoming a songwriter, but decided to try the west coast where he was hired as a script reader by Universal Studios. He had managed to break into screenwriting on a modest basis when World War II broke out. After he was discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons, he began to write musicals and comedies for the New York stage. At the age of 25, he had three musicals playing on Broadway-- Merry Widow, Jackpot, and Dream with Music. He went on to win a Tony Award for the musical Redhead.
Sheldon eventually returned to Hollywood and spent 12 years as a successful screenwriter at both MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. His acclaim as a screenwriter was capped by the Oscar he won for the screenplay of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947). He wrote 25 films during his lifetime including Jumbo and Anything Goes. He won a Screen Writers Guild Award for best musical of the year for Easter Parade in 1948 and for Annie Get Your Gun in 1950. He also wrote and produced several successful television series, including The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie, and Hart to Hart.
One of the world's best-selling writers, Sheldon decided to try writing a novel when he got an idea that he could not adapt to a play or a screenplay. His first novel, The Naked Face, won an Edgar for the best mystery novel of 1970. He wrote numerous novels during his lifetime including The Other Side of Midnight, Bloodline, Rage of Angels, If Tomorrow Comes, Windmills of the Gods, and Tell Me Your Dreams. He died on January 30, 2007. His title Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Imagine Donald Trump as a drop-dead gorgeous woman and you'll have an approximate image of Lara Cameron, the heroine of Sheldon's latest--barely tepid--potboiler. A super-successful real estate developer, Lara has made millions of dollars--and a few enemies--in her ascent from a childhood of deprivation to the upper echelons of the business world. When she falls in love with a renowned concert pianist, she sets about ``winning'' him as she would a prime piece of waterfront property. But her ties to a lawyer with Mafia connections and her shady way of doing business threaten her happiness and eventually her income and reputation. In settings that vary from Canada to Chicago and New York, bestselling novelist Sheldon ( The Other Side of Midnight, Rage of Angels ) brings real zest to the high-stakes poker game that provides the novel's backdrop. But his pancake-flat characters are as insubstantial as the paper fortunes that drive the real estate business. Moreover, the characters have an annoying tendency to speak in overwrought cliches; sounding for all the world like Scarlett O'Hara, young Lara laments, ``Someday . . . I will have my own land, and no one--no one--will ever take it away from me.'' Frankly, by the final chapter, readers won't give a damn. First serial to Cosmopolitan; Literary Guild main selection. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
It may conclude in 1992, but Sheldon's latest is sheer 80's excess--the compulsively readable, sin-laden saga of a tycooness who's part Donald Trump, part Leona Helmsley. Though Sheldon's recent heroines (Memories of Midnight, etc.) have been sexy saints, his earlier leading ladies had a crueler edge--just like young Canadian Lara Cameron here, who in a series of canny real-estate deals uses her body as well as her wits to climb out of backwater poverty. With $3 million in her pocket, Lara moves to Chicago, multiplies her fortune, and, in 1984, takes on N.Y.C. There, even as she puts up a Monopoly board's worth of hotels and office buildings, including the world's tallest; battles sexism in the industry; and proves wildly generous to her employees, Lara reveals a darker side--slapping one worker; drugging prospective investors with Valium; harassing tenants by turning their building into a de facto homeless shelter; bedding mob lawyer Paul Martin. Is Sheldon depicting the evolution of a monster? Not at all--for outweighing these flaws, he hammers home, are Lara's ``independence and courage, her talent and vision and generosity.'' And her loneliness, dispelled by marriage to star pianist Philip Adler, the perfect icing on Lara's cake. So where's the drama? It comes in spades in the late 80's, as the market crashes: Lara's fortune dwindles; her ex-secretary writes a tell- all book; and the law starts poking into the casino that Lara set up with Paul Martin's crooked help, and into the attack by a thug- -hired by a jealous Lara?--who cut Philip's wrist and career. Can it be that, like another hotel queen, Lara will end up wearing stripes? Don't bet on it. Savvy Sheldon knows that nothing becomes the rich and famous like a little scandal, and that a faux-morality tale like Lara's needs an upbeat ending to play big--as this one will, right to the top. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for November)
Booklist Review
With his usual lightning pacing, Sheldon whisks readers through the story of real-estate tycoon Lara Cameron as she claws her way to the top. Fleeing Nova Scotia and the memories of her lowly roots and drunken father, Lara builds an empire in Chicago and New York that is based on snap decisions and gutsy gambles. But with only the platonic friendship of her financial adviser and a passionate but shallow liaison with a married Mafia boss, it's lonely in the penthouse until Lara meets concert pianist Philip Adler. As Lara's love life takes off, however, her career starts being sabotaged. Setting them in just enough romantic locales, Sheldon weaves just enough of the details of power-brokering and the lives of the rich and famous into the tight plot to ground but not slow the action. His latest racy read will be a Literary Guild Main Selection and a serial in Cosmopolitan, so expect the usual clamor for it. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1992)0688084907Candace Smith
