FOREVER AMBERKafhleen Winsor Macmillan ($3).
Kathleen Winsor had always wanted to write something more impressive than the stuff she was paid to writefootball stories ("from the woman's point of view") for the Oakland, Calif. Tribune. Not long after her husband, Robert John Herwig, an All-America footballer, brought home a book on King Charles II, she decided to write a novel about the reign of Britain's gamiest monarch.
She began by reading some 400 books on the period (1660-1685), filled four fat notebooks with data, made scores of watercolor sketches of period houses, furniture, costumes....