Fleur de Leigh's Life of Crime - Hardcover

Pete Dexter author of "Paris Trout" One of those rare first novels that just makes you smile. Not only for what it is -- and it is consequential and funny -- but for what it promises for the future.

Tucked away in her parents' lavish Beverly Hills mansion, young Fleur de Leigh has all the benefits of a privileged upbringing. Hers is a world marked by glamour and abundance, where the air is thick with showbiz glitz and couches sink under big screen stars. Fleur's mother, a flamboyant, ambitious B-movie actress and eponymous star of "The Charmian Leigh Radio Mystery Half-Hour," and her aloof father, currently reduced to producing TV game shows, casually entrust their daughter to a procession of nannies. Among them are Bettina, who accessorizes her uniform with high heels; Clover, an orphan determined on an acting career; and the monstrous Miss Hoate, whose brief tenure ends when she is escorted from the job in a straitjacket. From the quirky to the certifiably insane, these women all play a role in shaping Fleur, touching her heart, and ours, in unique and unpredictable ways. Diane Leslie won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction for "A Life of Crime," the story that forms the novel's first chapter. It was subsequently read by actress Jill Eikenberry at L.A.'s Getty Museum and broadcast nationwide on NPR's "Selected Shorts." By turns heartrending and uplifting, comic and elegiac, "Fleur de Leigh's Life of Crime" heralds the debut of an extraordinarily talented novelist.