The lives of three feisty, snarky women intertwine in popular author Beatrice Williams’ Under the Stars. Containing a more modern setting and more acerbic characters than her usual fare, this women’s fiction novel examines the question of what exactly ties people together – and what pushes them apart.

Audrey Fisher is not having a stellar year. Not only has her husband absconded into the night with all their money, her dog just died of cancer, her restaurant has failed, and she is swimming in debt. Those are plenty of problems to be getting on with, but added to the mess is that her beautiful, brilliant mother is once more in need of her care-giving. Audrey spent much of her childhood looking after her movie star mom and has no real desire to spend any part of her adult life doing so. However, the studio has promised to pay her a hefty salary if she can just keep aging screen idol Meredith Fisher sober for the next three months as she prepares for her next role. Audrey agrees for the sake of the money, not her mom.

The most private place for this detox to occur is the dilapidated mansion Meredith still owns on Winthrop Island in New England. It was their home until Meredith’s acting career officially took off, but once Meredith landed in LA with Audrey in tow, she never went back. Audrey’s dad, Mike, still lives on the island, where he owns the Mohegan Inn, literally the only eatery on that small piece of land, and he refused to follow them (or even visit) once they left. He hasn’t seen his wife or daughter in decades, although he dutifully sent checks for Audrey’s birthday and Christmas. And thus our stage is set for a messy reunion. And the discovery of a chest of items from the past, which solves a century-old mystery.

1846: The hustle and bustle of the New England Thanksgiving holiday season provides the perfect cover for Providence Dare to flee Boston. She boards the steamship Atlantic on a cold and stormy night, hiding from Mr. Starkweather, a detective bent on blaming her for beloved painter Henry Irving’s death. The ship is caught in a terrific storm, resulting in a loss of power, with the captain barely able to keep them afloat. As the passengers are forced to huddle together in the main parlor, Providence makes the startling discovery that Mr. Starkweather is on the Atlantic with her. In the middle of the ocean, with a storm fiercely batting their powerless ship about on the sea, there is no opportunity for Providence to escape – until a wisp of an island appears on the horizon.

If you’ve missed the sex, scandal, sun, and selfishness of seventies women’s fiction à la Judith Krantz, and Jackie Collins, then this novel is for you. In fact, the story would probably have worked better if it had been set in the hedonistic heyday of the early parts of that decade! Told from differing viewpoints (primarily Audrey, Meredith, and Pru), the story takes us in and out of their dangerous affairs and slowly reveals their darkest secrets.

Those secrets all highlight the poor decision-making skills of our heroines. Audrey is the most open among the women, but is also the most prone to making poor choices. Not only had she married a man she barely knew against her mother’s advice, but she had also blithely allowed him to keep her in the dark concerning their joint business venture. Once on the island, as a paid sobriety coach, she leaves Meredith to her own devices while hanging out with her father at his bar. (Obviously, it wouldn’t exactly work for Meredith to have joined them.) Audrey spends a lot of her time there complaining about the state of the kitchen and whining about how she is a Culinary Institute of America graduate and can totally upgrade their menu and the state of the facility. It’s while she is ‘fixing’ things that a fire starts, and Prudence’s mysterious trunk is discovered.

Making a mess while stumbling into a mystery is par for the course for Audrey. She blames Mike and Meredith, who were – apparently – horrible parents, thus turning her into a rude lunatic. The magic of fiction allows everyone to understand Audrey’s general acerbity completely. She even finds a new love on the island, Sedgwick Peabody, who follows her like a devoted puppy and accepts her whippings regardless of how unearned they are.

Prudence is a harder character to get a read on. At times, her naïvety is so pronounced that I found myself wondering if the author meant for us to conclude that she has a disability. At other times, it’s clear her innocence is a smoke screen for her duplicitous character. I struggled to reconcile how she seemed to care deeply for the ill, and yet was equally capable of making pragmatic, some might even say murderous, choices when necessary.

While Audrey complains of Meredith’s poor parenting, Meredith was a pillar of maternal virtue compared to her own mother, whose negligence resulted in Meredith making poor decisions that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Of all the characters, I found Meredith the most sympathetic. Her issues were less of her own making than they were the inevitable result of being surrounded by a whirlwind of mess and having to deal with the debris that inevitably fell upon her as a result. She is equally as charming and sincere as she is acerbic, which is different to Audrey, who carries the chips on her shoulders nearly incessantly.

The plotting is very convoluted as a result of all the secrets being slowly revealed throughout the narrative, and the ending involves so much deus ex machina to solve the problems the heroines face and resolve all the issues between them, it’s almost farcical. The characters’ refusal to use technology for darn near anything made it feel like I was in the eighties rather than the nineties (Meredith’s timeline) and 2024, and the romance is inexplicable, as the two characters have absolutely no reason to fall for each other.

The salvation of the tale lies in the author’s seductive prose, which keeps you in the same kind of horrified fascination that has one rubbernecking at a car accident. She also employs a crisp, clear style that makes it easy to turn the pages.

If you are a big fan of over-the-top, dramatic women’s fiction featuring deeply dysfunctional families, Under the Stars might be the perfect read for you. Otherwise, I would give it a miss.