THE SPA AT LAVENDER LANE

For the past 25 years, Nadia Demidova has been the director of Lavender Lane in Palm Springs, California, one of the world’s most exclusive spas. She likes to observe her guests arriving from behind the two-way mirror in her office—she can always pick out the difficult ones. The clients for the current 10-day session may be just that: Mavis Perkins, an ex-model married to one of the wealthiest men in Chicago; Charlotte Tanner, an overweight Texas housewife accompanied by her sex-curious teenage daughter, Lauren; Toni Etheridge, a former fashion buyer pregnant with the child of a married man; and Dr. Eleanor Franklin, the CEO of a nutritional company who is hiding out after a plastic surgery gone awry. The session gets off to a rocky start, but with the help of her assistant director, Phoebe Bancroft, Nadia soon has the clients making friends and swapping sob stories over healthy dinners and relaxing beautification treatments. Then Nadia dies suddenly of a heart attack, and the spa’s future is up in the air. Phoebe hopes that she can run it herself, but when Nadia’s handsome and eligible son, Peter Culvane, arrives, the competition begins to see who can snag the bachelor—and the spa along with him. Melhado’s prose is smooth and sybaritic, giving one the sense of reading a novel set inside a series of glossy magazine ads: “Peter Culvane admired the rich patina and clean lines of his Biedermeier credenza as he sipped coffee from an old mug. He certainly had access to the best china money could buy, but somehow coffee always tasted better in the chipped and discolored Stamford classic he had used since college days.” The plot is fairly low stakes—one storyline revolves heavily around a quince-scented face cream—and everything wraps up in a neat way, just as readers will expect. Even so, the author manages to achieve a mostly satisfying mix of humor, sexual tension, female friendship, and spiritual rejuvenation.

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