"Whatever happened to Anne Welles?" asks Rae Lawrence in the opening line of Shadow of the Dolls (Crown; 320 pages; $22), a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann's classic 1966 paean to babes, booze and barbiturates. Susann had her own ideas about the fate of Anne, the well-bred supermodel, and her buddy Neely O'Hara, the libidinous, scheming singer. She wrote a plot outline before she died in 1974, and it is partly from this that romance author Lawrence has drawn the new novel.
To make the story seem contemporary, Lawrence introduces a medicine cabinet full of new pharmaceuticals...