Isabel's Bed

When Harriet Mahoney first saw it, Isabel Krug's bed was covered in sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. The unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted Harriet had fled wintry Manhattan in response to a mysterious ad in The New York Review of Books: ''Book in progress? Why not share my Cape Cod retreat? Roomy and peaceful - your life will be your own.'' In a room with a view atop a Truro dune, Harriet starts on a different path to fulfillment by ghostwriting The Isabel Krug Story, based on the sexy blonde's tabloid past - specifically, a nasty night in Greenwich, Connecticut, when Guy VanVleet died and Isabel (giving new meaning to the notion of femme fatale) lived to tell about it on Court TV. Unusually talented in the man department (''I give lessons''), Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all, including the tangled history Isabel shares with her odd lodger, an artist called Costas. Life according to Isabel is a soap-opera extravaganza, an experience to be swallowed whole - and the attitude is catching. Soon, memories of Harriet's bagel-baking ex-boyfriend pale next to the attentions of a gentle man who has the grace to appreciate in Harriet what other men have failed to see. After a few New York adventures, when the mysteries of Isabel are solved and her louder-than-life story is written, Harriet begins her own free fall into happiness.... Witty, sage, and compassionate, filled with zany and endearing characters, Isabel's Bed joins the stellar company of Elinor Lipman's unforgettable fiction.