Desert rain

By revising and padding her first contemporary romance, Lowell (Autumn Lover) has created a new full-length novel. Holly Shannon North is a tomboy turned fashion model who meets up with former flame, Linc McKenzie, during a photo shoot near Palm Springs. She realizes that Linc loves "Holly," the girl she was at 16, but has no interest in "Shannon," the sophisticated cover girl she has become. Holly tries to convince Linc, who seems to believe otherwise, that beauty does not equal evil. The love scenes are trademark Lowell: dynamic, sensual and thoroughly satisfying, but the book's premise is so weak and the characters so flat they can't sustain the added (in fact, doubled) verbiage. -- Publishers Weekly.