In Sugar and Spice, fate brings together two

remarkable women from different back-

grounds, one of them haunted by her past,

the other struggling to find her future--both

of them women of ambition and hunger, vul-

nerability and passion. Sweeping from the

vast sugar plantations of Argentina to the

competitive art and magazine worlds of New

York, from the slums of Rio deJaneiro to the

glamorous Paris fashion scene and the

nouvelle-greed climate of London in the late

1980s, it is a rivetingand dramatic story of

love and revenge.

Pandora Doyle, a young Englishwoman,

has fled London and the wreckage of her mar-

riage to work at Chic, a slick New York maga-

zine run by her oldest and dearest school

friend. Arianne de la Force, a beautiful, fabu-

lously wealthy Latin American widow, fought

her way out of the slums of Rio and a life of

penury in Paris to become the star model of

Balenciaga s last collection, a role that led to

her marriage to one of the world s richest

men, the largest landholder in Argentina.

Although she has learned to run her late hus-

band s business empire as effectively as he

once did, and though she moves with self-

assurance through the rarefied world she now

inhabits, she is constantly menaced by a

secret from her past: a long-ago murder in Rio

for which she may or may not be responsible.

The world s most expensive painting first

draws the two women together, at a glittering

auction at Christie s in New York. Intrigued

by Arianne, Pandora decides to write a profile

of her for Chic. As the two women s lives

become entwined, their initial suspicion and

mistrust of each other give way to friend-

ship, a bond based on honesty and respect.

Pandora begins to formulate a plan that

will transform her both personally and

professionally--a business proposal for a

chain of interior-design stores that becomes a

springboard into a different world and makes

her a success in her own right. But in the