The Sky Is Falling His Dazzling New Bestseller details from bookadda

About The Author:

Born in Chicago on February 11, 1917, Sidney Sheldon entered Northwestern University on a scholarship in 1935, but was soon forced to drop out due to the Depression. He went to Manhattan in hopes of becoming a songwriter, but decided to try the west coast where he was hired as a script reader by Universal Studios. He had managed to break into screenwriting on a modest basis when World War II broke out. After he was discharged from the Air Force for medical reasons, he began to write musicals and comedies for the New York stage. At the age of 25, he had three musicals playing on Broadway-- Merry Widow, Jackpot, and Dream with Music. He went on to win a Tony Award for the musical Redhead. Sheldon eventually returned to Hollywood and spent 12 years as a successful screenwriter at both MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. His acclaim as a screenwriter was capped by the Oscar he won for the screenplay of The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947). He wrote 25 films during his lifetime including Jumbo and Anything Goes. He won a Screen Writers Guild Award for best musical of the year for Easter Parade in 1948 and for Annie Get Your Gun in 1950. He also wrote and produced several successful television series, including The Patty Duke Show, I Dream of Jeannie, and Hart to Hart. One of the world's best-selling writers, Sheldon decided to try writing a novel when he got an idea that he could not adapt to a play or a screenplay. His first novel, The Naked Face, won an Edgar for the best mystery novel of 1970. He wrote numerous novels during his lifetime including The Other Side of Midnight, Bloodline, Rage of Angels, If Tomorrow Comes, Windmills of the Gods, and Tell Me Your Dreams. He died on January 30, 2007.

Special Features:

Efficiently brisk and reliably suspenseful, Sheldon's (Tell Me Your Dreams, etc.) 17th novel demonstrates that this veteran master of commercial fiction has not lost his touch. Freshly returned to Washington, D.C., from a stint reporting in Sarajevo, TV newscaster Dana Evans (introduced in Sheldon's The Best Laid Plans) struggles to cope with her new adopted son, troubled 12-year-old Kemal, whose parents and sister were killed in the fighting. Back on the job, Dana interviews youngish millionaire Gary Winthrop, the scion of a Kennedyesque clan, only to learn the next day that the prospective Senate candidate and philanthropist has been murdered in his Washington townhouse. Unbelievably, Dana is the only person who finds it odd that five members of the Winthrop family have died violent deaths in the last year. Despite this weakness in the plot, Sheldon crafts a page-turner that takes Dana on a worldwide quest from France, Germany and Italy to Alaska and Moscow as she pursues her hunch that all the Winthrop deaths are related. Deceased family patriarch Taylor Winthrop, she discovers, was a manipulative, unscrupulous businessman, politico and womanizer with many enemies. And the senior Winthrop's connection to the real-life Siberian underground city of Krasnoyarsk-26 and its production of plutonium proves the source of the family's wealth and their ill fortune. A love triangle involving Dana, sports anchor Jeff Connors and his ex-wife, internationally known model Rachel Stevens, seems gratuitous, tossed in merely to add plot texture, but it does provide some viable moments of romance and schmaltz. When the villains behind the killings turn against Dana as she comes closer to the truth, the tension builds and holds right through to a seven-alarm finale. Agent, Mort Janklow. 750,000 first printing; Literary Guild and Doubleday main selections; Mystery Guild featured alternate; People Book Club alternate; 6-city author tour. (Sept.)