Cha Cha Cha
Reviews • Inspiration • Read the First Chapter
What does a woman do when her husband loses everything in the stock market... then ditches her to go back to his first wife? If she's Alison Waxman Koff, and she's spent most of the 80's living the Good Life in an extravagant mansion in an upscale Connecticut exurb, she sells her furs and starts doing her own nails. When that isn't enough, she falls back on her one marketable skill: housecleaning. When that ends in mayhem and the murder of a bestselling sleaze biographer, Alison finds herself with yet another role to play: prime suspect.
Suspense meets romance meets zany comedy in Jane Heller's hard-hitting and hilarious debut novel about love and survival in the '90s. Alison Waxman Koff is a true heroine for our times as she scrambles to keep in step with a changing world and to find love with a man who might just turn out to be Prince Charming after all.
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USA TODAY
8/1/94
Larry King's People
News & Views
My two cents ... Jane Heller's Cha Cha Cha is a fine first novel that reads like a summer breeze ...
Booklist
Reviewed by Mary Ellen Quinn
Alison Koff's husband, Sandy, tells her that all their money is gone and that he's going back to his first wife. Alison is left with Maplebark Manor, the 18-room mansion they bought and renovated. The bank is threatening to foreclose, and Alison's part-time job writing features for the local paper doesn't pay much, so she puts the house on the market and sets out to find more work. She is annoyed by, and then later attracted to, Cullie Harrington, the photographer who comes to take pictures of her house for the real-estate brochure. Housekeeping is the only job Alison can find, and her employer turns out to be the celebrity-biographer Melanie Moloney, who's working on a tell-all book about a prominent newspaper owner; Alison has hardly begun work when her boss is murdered. Alison is the prime suspect, but she manages to identify the real killer, discovering some shocking secrets about her own family along the way. She also sheds all the trappings of her upscale 1980s lifestyle and finds love. A bright, lively comedy that zips right along.
Copyright ©1994, American Library Association. All rights reserved
Library Journal
Reviewed by Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
The stock market crash of 1987 brings an end to the good life that Alison and Sandy Koff have enjoyed during the 1980s. Not only do they lose all their money, but Sandy decides to return to his first wife. Alison can't make ends meet with her part-time job as a reporter for the local newspaper, so she goes to work as a maid for Melanie Moloney, the celebrity writer who's in town to dig up the dirt on Senator Alistair Downs, the subject of her next tell-all biography. When Alison finds Melanie murdered, she's the main suspect, but others had a good reason to kill Melanie, including Downs himself, his daughter Bethany, and Cullie Harrington, an architectural photographer and Alison's new love. Although readers will figure out whodunit long before Alison does, this sexy and humorous first novel will be enjoyed by fans of Susan Isaacs's After All These Years and Judith Viorst's Murdering Mr. Monti.
My first novel, Cha Cha Cha, was published in hardcover by Kensington Books in the summer of 1994 - a thrilling experience for me, as I had never dreamed I would write a novel, much less get one published.
I was living in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and working as a freelance writer when the idea for the story popped into my head. It was the mid-eighties - the Reagan "go-go" years - when people seemed to have lots of money and even more lavish ways of spending it. Enormous houses were sprouting up all around me, some of them with indoor squash courts and bowling alleys, even a few moats and turrets. I said to myself, Some day the debt is going to come due and all this prosperity will evaporate. Which it did on October 19, 1987, the day the stock market crashed.
I thought, what if you were one of the people who lost everything?
And then I thought, what if you were a wealthy suburban princess who lived in a mansion and never had to work and your biggest challenge was getting to your manicure on time? What if you lost everything?
That's the setup for Cha Cha Cha, a social satire about our excesses and pretensions. After the heroine's husband loses all their money in the stock market crash and leaves her for his first wife, she's stuck in a house she can't afford and can't sell and doesn't have any means of supporting herself - until she answers an ad for a maid. Without telling her fancy friends or her demanding mother about her new job, she packs her Pledge, her Windex and her Fantastik into her Porsche and goes to work. When her employer gets murdered and she becomes the prime suspect, she discovers an inner strength she never knew she had - and finds love in the process.
Dubbed a comic mystery-romance, Cha Cha Cha, which is available in a Kensington paperback edition, was a selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club and was optioned for a television movie by Columbia/TriStar. It also landed me on the "Today" show. Not a bad start for a fledgling novelist!
Since so many of the reviews for Cha Cha Cha declared the book a "beach read," I decided to embark on the first-ever "beach author tour." Instead of doing traditional bookstore signings, I appeared at beaches throughout Connecticut and signed copies and chatted with sunbathers.
It was great fun. I'm still shaking the sand out of my shoes!
