The Hot, Steamy, Or Just Plain Romantic Danielle Steel Book Each Zodiac Should Read
Aries
“Top TV anchorwoman Melanie Adams had given up on love after a failed marriage and an unhappy affair. With her two teenage children and her television news career, she had no room in her life for a man. Then she met famous heart surgeon Peter Hallam, a widower with three children of his own. Suddenly Melanie was experiencing feelings she thought were gone forever. But two families (one in New York and one in Los Angeles), two exciting careers, and two strong-willed people were too much to handle. And Melanie faced a painful choice between her glamorous life in the public eye, her private life, the needs of her family, and the new family she took on. Changes lead each of them to new places, new problems, new people, and the new life they begin.”
Taurus
“The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, very nearly, everything. The place is a small midwestern town with a high school and a downtown, a skating pond and a movie house. And on a tree-lined street in the heartland of America, an extraordinary set of events begins to unfold. And gradually what seems serendipitous is tinged with purpose. A happy home is shattered by a child’s senseless death. A loving marriage starts to unravel. And a stranger arrives—a young woman who will touch many lives before she moves on. She and a young man will meet and fall in love. Their love, so innocent and full of hope, helps to restore a family’s dreams. And all of their lives will be changed forever by the precious gift she leaves them.”
Gemini
“In a matter of days, Peter McDowell loses everything he has worked so hard for—his wealth, his property, his livelihood as a star investment banker. And then it gets worse. The stock market crash not only plunges Peter into joblessness, it causes a rift in his marriage that he cannot repair. Stripped of everything, he has only one place to retreat: a lakeside cottage he inherited from his parents, who left most of their modest estate to Peter’s twin. With no other choice, the prodigal son goes home.
A beloved small-town doctor, a devoted family man, and a pillar of his community, Michael McDowell serves others without regard to personal gain. Only Peter knows how Michael manipulated their parents when the boys were young, ultimately driving Peter away. At first, he dreads seeing Michael again. But, to his surprise, their reunion is tender and real. Only later, as Peter mulls over his late mother’s journals, does the truth begin to emerge, as realization and panic begin to set in. Who is his twin? Is the façade real, or does something terrifying lie beneath? Imagination or a reality too terrifying to believe?
In a race for time, Peter throws caution to the winds to find the truth. What he discovers will change their lives forever, the lives of their children, and an entire town.”
Cancer
“Smart, likable Bernie Fine was the wonder boy of Wolff’s, New York’s most glamorous department store. A senior VP on the way up, he arrives in San Francisco to open a West Coast store. His career is skyrocketing, but his life lacks a center. When he looks into the wide, innocent eyes of five-year-old Jane O’Reilly, and then into the equally enchanting eyes of her mother, Liz, Bernie knows he has found what he has been looking for.
Bernie thought he had found love to last a lifetime, but when Liz is stricken with cancer, time becomes painfully short. Alone with two children, Bernie must face the loss and learn that life has other fine things to offer.”
Leo
“Twenty-one-year-old Candy is blazing her way through Paris, New York, and Tokyo as fashion’s latest international supermodel. Her sister Tammy, twenty-nine, has a job producing the most successful hit show on TV. In New York, oldest sister Sabrina, thirty-four, is an ambitious young lawyer, while Annie, at twenty-six, is an American in Florence, living for her art. One Fourth of July weekend, the four sisters come home to Connecticut for their family’s annual gathering. But before the holiday is over, tragedy strikes and their world is utterly changed.
Suddenly, four sisters who have been fervently pursuing success and their own lives come together to share one New York brownstone, to support each other, and to pick up the pieces while one of them struggles to heal her shattered body and soul. A bustling house is soon filled with eccentric dogs, laughter, tears, friends, men… and the kind of honesty and unconditional love only sisters can provide. But as the four women settle in, they are forced to confront the direction of their respective lives.”
Virgo
Bill Thigpen, writer producer of the No.1 daytime TV drama was so busy watching his career soar that he never noticed his marriage collapse. Now, nine years later, living alone in Hollywood, even without his wife and kids, his life and success are still reasonably sweet. Top-of-the-chart ratings, good-natured casual affairs, and special vacations with his two young sons. His life is in perfect balance, he thinks.
Adrian Townshed thought she had everything: a job she liked as a TV production assistant and a handsome husband who was a rising star in his own field. In as enviable life they’d worked hard for—the American Dream. Until she got pregnant. Suddenly all she had was chaos. And Steven’s ultimatum. Him or the baby. The question was: did he mean it? He did.
Bill Thigpen and Adrian Townshed collided in a supermarket. And the very sight of her suddenly makes him want more in his life…. a woman he really loves, a real family again. But does he need the heartache of another man’s baby, another wife? Neither does. But they couldn’t help it.”
Libra
“From her secret perch at the top of the stairs, Gabriella Harrison watches the guests arrive at her parents’ lavish Manhattan townhouse. At seven, she knows she is an intruder in her parents’ party, in her parents’ life. But she can’t resist the magic. Later, she waits for the click, click, click of her mother’s high heels, the angry words, and the pain that will follow. Gabriella already knows to hide her bruises, certain she is to blame for her mother’s rage–and her father’s failure to protect her. Her world is a confusing blend of terror, betrayal, and pain. Her parents’ aristocratic world is no safeguard against the abuse that knows no boundaries, respects no person, no economic lines. Gabriella knows that, try as she might, there is no safe place for her to hide.
Even as a child, her only escape is through the stories she writes. Only writing can dull the pain of her lonely world. And when her parents’ marriage collapses, Gabriella is given her first reprieve, as her father disappears, and then her mother abandons her to a convent. There, Gabriella’s battered body and soul begin to mend. Amid the quiet safety and hushed rituals of the nuns, Gabriella grows into womanhood in a safe, peaceful world. Then a young priest comes into her life.
Father Joe Connors never questioned his vocation until Gabriella entered the confessional and shared her soul. Confession leads to friendship. And friendship grows dangerously into love. Like Gabriella, Joe is haunted by the pain of his childhood, consumed by guilt over a family tragedy, for which he blames himself. With Gabriella, Joe takes the first steps toward healing. But their relationship leads to tragedy as Joe must choose between the priesthood and Gabriella, and life in the real world where he fears he does not belong, and cannot cope.
Exiled and disgraced, and nearly destroyed, Gabriella struggles to survive on her own in New York. There she seeks healing and escape through her writing again, this time as an adult, and her life as a writer begins. But just when she thinks she is beyond hurt, Gabriella is once again betrayed by someone she trusts. Brought to the edge of despair, physically attacked beyond recognition and belief, haunted by abuse in her present and her past, she nonetheless manages to find hope again, and the courage to face the past. On a pilgrimage destined to bring her face-to-face with those who sought to destroy her in her early life, she finds forgiveness, freedom from guilt, and healing from abuse. When Gabriella faces what was done to her, and why, she herself is free at last.”
Scorpio
“As a journalist, Paxton Andrews would experience Vietnam firsthand. We follow her from high school in Savannah to college in Berkeley and then to work in Saigon.
For the soldiers she knew and met there, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways they could never have imagined. For the men in her life, Viet Nam would change their lives in ways hey could not escape or deny. Peter Wilson, fresh from law school, was a new recruit who would confont his fate in Da Nang. Ralph Johnson, a seasoned AP correspondent, had been in Saigon since the beginning. He knew Vietnam and the war inside out. Bill Quinn, captain of the Cu Chi tunnel rats, was on his fourth tour of duty and it seemed nothing could touch him. Sergeant Tony Campobello had come to Vietnam from the streets of New York to vent a rage that had followed him all the way to Saigon.
For seven years Paxton Andrews would write an acclaimed newspaper column from the front before finally returning to the States and then attending the Paris peace talks. But for her and the men who fought in Viet Nam, life would never be the same again.”
Sagittarius
“When a beautiful young Frenchwoman and a brilliant American actor meet in wartime Paris, their love begins like a fairy tale but ends in tragedy. Suddenly orphaned, their three children are cruelly separated. Megan, the baby, adopted by a family of comfortable means, becomes a doctor in the rural Appalachia. Alexandra, raised in lavish wealth, marries a powerful man whose pride is in his pedigree and who assumes that Alexandra is her parents’ natural offspring. Neither of them has the remotest suspicion that she is adopted, or what turbulent tragedy lurks in her past. And Hilary, oldest of the Walker children, remembers them all, and the grief that tore them apart and cast them into separate lives. Feeling the loss throughout her life, and unable to find her sisters, she builds an extraordinary career and has no personal life.
When John Chapman, lawyer and prestigious private investigator, is asked to find these three women, he wonders why. Their parents’ only friend, he did nothing to keep them together as children and has been haunted by remorse all his life. The investigator follows a trail that leads from chic New York to Boston slums, from elegant Parisian salons to the Appalachian hills, to the place where the three sisters face each other and one more final, devastating truth before they can move on.”
Capricorn
“At seventeen, the night of her mother’s funeral, Grace Adams is attacked. It is not the first time, and a brutal crime ensues.
And to everyone’s horror, Grace will not tell the truth. She is a young woman with secrets too horrible to tell, with hurts so deep they may never heal. She is also beautiful enough for men to want her no matter how much she does not want them. Whatever the outcome, Grace Adams will have to live with whatever happened during those terrible years. After a lifetime of being a victim, now she must pay the price for other people’s sins.
From the depths of an Illinois women’s prison to a Chicago modeling agency to a challenging career in New York, Grace must carry the past with her wherever she goes. And in healing her own pain, she reaches out to battered women and children who live a nightmare she knows all too well.
When Grace meets Charles Mackenzie, a New York lawyer, she has found a man who wants nothing from her-except to heal her, to hear her secrets, and to give her the family she so desperately wants. But, with happiness finally within her grasp, and precious loved ones to protect, Grace is at her most vulnerable-in danger of losing everything to a vicious tabloid press and an enemy from her past, an enemy bent on malice at all costs.”
Aquarius
“As a young intern at an art gallery in Paris, Isabelle McAvoy meets Putnam Armstrong, wealthy, gentle, older, and secluded from the world. Isabelle’s relationship with Putnam, and her time at his château on the Normandy coast, are the stuff of dreams. But it turns real when she becomes pregnant, for she knows that marriage is out of the question.
When Isabelle returns to New York, she enters a new relationship that she hopes will be more stable and traditional. But she soon realizes she has made a terrible mistake and again finds herself a single mother.
With two young daughters and no husband, Isabelle finally and unexpectedly finds happiness and a love that gives her a third child, a baby as happy as her beloved father. And yet, once again, life brings dramatic changes.
The three girls grow up to be very different women, and Isabelle’s relationship with each of them is unique. While raising her girls alone, Isabelle also begins building a career as a successful art consultant. Then one final turn of fate brings a past secret to light, bonds mother and daughters closer, and turns a challenge into a blessing.”
Pisces
“Deanna was eighteen when she married a handsome Frenchman, attorney Marc-Edouard Duras. Now, at thirty-seven, she should be happy with Marc, her elegant home in San Francisco, and their teenage daughter, Pilar. But one summer changes it all when she realizes her failing marriage is a trap she must escape.”