Revenge

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 27 JUN 2011

Osbourne packs sex, secrets, and kitchen sink conflicts into her salacious fiction debut (after the memoir Sharon Osbourne Survivor). Whether it was written by, or "written by," the ambitious and savvy celebrity wife of bat-biting icon Ozzy doesn't really matter (the Times of London reported that Osbourne had help from the ghostwriter behind one of her memoirs); wicked fun is the name of the game. Osbourne knows well the territory of her hyperactive saga: the entertainment industry. With dizzying speed, and the kind of couplings most mortals merely dream of, half-sisters Chelsea (the headstrong, hedonistic older one) and Amber (the shy and sly one) win, lose, and trade fame and fortune in Tinseltown. Meanwhile, their British mother, the lovelorn and driven Margaret, has a secret: she fell in lust with Derek, but married his closeted gay brother George, and has kept mum on the girls' paternal heritage. It's a dizzying and addictive soap opera of craven ambition and family disloyalty with enough loose ends (a missing corpse, a budding career, and a nascent Hollywood empire) to guarantee that the Osbourne empire is already at work on a sequel.