When I first started reading The Trophy Wife, an eighties era throwback if there ever was one, I thought someone needed to sit the author down and explain the connotations of the term. It’s certainly loaded with them. If I say trophy wife, you think younger, second wife, right? A man’s done well for himself, his first marriage has run aground for some reason (perhaps because he cheated), and he’s out for wife number two, so he picks a younger, toned version – probably at least ten years younger than himself. No one seems to have explained this to the author, who interprets “trophy wife” as a divorced, shy woman of genteel family and reduced financial circumstances. Granted, she marries the hero for money, but he’s her age. Ironically enough, the heroine’s best friend is a classic trophy wife. She’s a former Vegas showgirl who married an old man, and (I’m not making this up) called him Big Daddy. But “The Trophy Wife’s Best Friend Who Marries a Rich Guy to Save Her Family Home” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? It doesn’t matter anyway, really, because no matter what you call it, this book is not worth reading.

Elizabeth Stanton’s ex-husband left her up the proverbial creek. After years of secretly bleeding her dry and emptying her family coffers straight into his own private Swiss accounts, he took off with her arch-rival, leaving her virtually penniless. All she has are her two ancestral homes: one in a ritzy area of Houston, and a nearby plantation on the Brazos River. Both come with dedicated staff who have been with the family for generations, and both are expensive to maintain. She is just beginning to consider selling the Houston home, when a surprising offer comes through. Max Riordan, a wealthy, self-made Houston businessman, wants to marry her. He will set her finances aright and save her homes, and she can offer him entrée into exclusive Houston society, furthering his ability to make deals with the old money types. At first, Elizabeth is completely against it. She would never do that! Never! But after she thinks about it for awhile (and even toys with marrying another man for the same reasons), she decides to accept Max’s offer. They marry as virtual strangers, and quickly embark on a New York honeymoon that is as much business as pleasure.

While they are in New York, they quickly connect on a sexual level. Max, being male, needed a society wife – he was careful to pick a hot one. But their trip is cut short when Elizabeth is hit by a truck and nearly killed. Everyone who witnessed the incident agrees that it is no accident, and that seems even more obvious the next day, when the murderous-looking truck driver shows up at Elizabeth’s hotel room. He is on the verge of breaking in when Max returns unexpectedly and he aborts his plans. The couple decides to head back to Houston early, but dismisses the whole plot as a case of mistaken identity. After all, who would want to kill Elizabeth? Actually, there are many, but Elizabeth and Max are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

When they get back to Houston, Max and Elizabeth deal with various family members and people from Houston society as they get to know each other and fall in love. There really isn’t much conflict between them; it’s about what you’d expect. They are falling in love with each other and having four star sex, but they are both a little afraid to admit what’s happening. So a lot of the plot revolves around the secondary characters. There’s Elizabeth’s cousins, who live in New York but conveniently show up all the time, the staff at her homes, and Mimi, the aforementioned best friend with the now deceased husband called Big Daddy. Max has his second in command, Troy, who hates the idea of Elizabeth and can barely bring himself to stay civil, and his mom, who loves Elizabeth. All of them are one-note characters with no dimension to speak of.

This book is basically a flop from start to finish. The problems are legion. Perhaps the most basic is that the whole thing has a Danielle Steel/Dallas/Knots Landing sensibility better left to days gone by. There’s nothing wrong with writing books about rich people. Hey, I like them as much as the next person. But the characters have to be people, not caricatures – and the book can’t just be about them being rich and that’s more or less all there is here. I really didn’t need the fifty million descriptions of Elizabeth’s underwear or Max’s car.

Another problem is that both of these characters, in different ways, appear to have fallen off the apple cart yesterday. Elizabeth didn’t know that it was a bad idea to give her husband complete power of attorney and total financial control of her family fortune. She is also apparently unaware of the mechanics of infertility; never once, in several years of marriage, did it occur to her that perhaps her husband was the one with “issues.” But then she’s so oblivious he could have been wearing a condom all that time without her knowledge. Max, meanwhile, has never heard of morning sickness. And in spite of his status as a billionaire, he has never heard that businessmen sometimes play golf together and make deals in the process.

Unfortunately, the whole book is characterized by heavy-handed, obvious writing, lame characterization, half-baked suspense plotting, and old school stereotypes. Unless you are really hankering for eighties rich people melodrama, I can’t think of any reason to pick this one up.