What do you do if you find your fiancé and your best
friend/maid of honor in a "compromising" position just days before
your wedding? If you are Amy Sherman, the star of Jane Heller's
most recent novel BEST ENEMIES, you throw them both out of your
life and vow never to look back. Unfortunately, no matter how hard
you try to forget your past, life has a funny way of forcing it
back into your present.


Best friends Amy Sherman and Tara Messer are now the worst of
enemies after Amy catches her fiancé, Stuart Lasher, in bed
with Tara. While Amy had always been the thoughtful, hardworking
plain Jane, Tara was the beautiful, confident, homecoming queen.
Losing her fiance to the one woman whose shadow she had always
lived in was devastating to Amy. She decided that focusing on her
career in publishing and pushing the betrayal out of her mind would
help her move on in life and in love.


However, years later, Amy, now a publicist for the large publishing
house Lowery and Trammel, is unexpectedly reunited with Tara when
she learns she has to publicize her new book, SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL. The
theme of Tara's book is her perfect life with her perfect husband
Stuart. Things could not get any worse for Amy until she lies to
Tara about having moved on from the heartbreak with Stuart straight
into the arms of a loving man who has now become her fiancé.
Now, Amy not only has to willingly parade Tara around and turn
SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL into a bestseller, but she also has to make a
fiancé appear magically before Tara's perfectly beautiful,
flawless face.


Amy tries to turn one of America's most reclusive mystery authors
into her stand-in fiancé without him knowing of her
complicated plan. The twists and turns that Amy must face in trying
to keep up the façade are hilarious and unpredictable. Amy is
one of the most likable, intelligent and honest characters in
women's fiction. The majority of the novel is from Amy's point of
view, but three quarters of the way through the book we are
introduced to Tara's thoughts and feelings and no longer see her as
the villain. We begin to see that no matter how perfect a life
looks from the outside, everyone has secrets that they try to keep
hidden from others. Tara may be beautiful and live a "simply
beautiful" life, but sadness and betrayal lurk beneath her perfect
surface.


BEST ENEMIES explores the complex relationship between female
friends. Heller allows us to see that there are always two sides of
a story and when it comes to matters of the heart, no one is ever
completely innocent. In rediscovering their discarded friendship,
Tara and Amy learn that the dramas of life affect everyone equally,
and it is all about how you handle what is thrown your way that
defines your character and turns you into the person you are meant
to be. Throw in an unexpected romance, a missing person and some
members of the Russian mob, and you have a great novel by a great
author. BEST ENEMIES is impossible to put down and is the best
addition to your summer reading list.