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Single Mom Of Three Churns Out Steamy Thrillers

Mike Cochran Associated Press

Nope, says Jane Holleman, smiling, she is not the slinky, mysterious-looking blonde who decorates the cover of “Killer Gorgeous.”

Her green eyes sparkling, she concedes also that she did not write her steamy new book’s jacket blurb: “An adrenaline-charged tale set in the gritty fringes of the urban Southwest, this startling debut novel blazes with a noir edge, slick action and dark wit.”

And the mother of three is most adamant in denying that the villain in “Killer Gorgeous” is modeled after former husband Bill Lane, a high-profile criminal attorney whom she divorced in 1993.

Holleman insists it is only coincidental that Lane and the vicious, fictitious Marshall Robbins both are lawyers. And that the heroine of the book, Allison Robbins, like Holleman, is a blond beauty with three young children.

“I gave Allison three children because I have three children,” she says. “If I had left one out, one of my kids would ask me: ‘Why did you leave me out?”’

She does fret over the coarse language and sizzling story lines of “Killer Gorgeous” and an upcoming second Pocket Books paperback, “Hell’s Belle.”

“I’m comforted by the fact that the littlest one can’t read,” she jokes.

Actually, she says, she’s not going to let her children - Sarah, 11, John, 10, and Blythe, 6 - read her books until they are 21.

Still, she adds, “I couldn’t make any of my characters sound like Quakers. It’s their world, not mine. ‘Hell’s Belle’ is just as bad. A very beautiful but sinister woman sleeps with married men, and when they won’t leave their wives, she murders them.

At the moment, she is defending her choice of lawyers as villains.

“Attorneys are all villainous and you know that,” she says, again smiling and pointing out that Marshall Robbins not only is a lawyer but a district attorney.

“Attorneys know the law, and Marshall is the law. If you know the law, if you are the law and if you break the law, that’s interesting,” she says.

“And besides, everyone hates lawyers.”

Until recently, Jane Holleman was known simply as Janie. But at 42, she says she’s too old to be a Janie and, anyway, readers wouldn’t take an author named Janie seriously.

Writing aside, it’s difficult to take Jane or Janie too seriously.

“I have a Madison Avenue literary agent, a Sunset Boulevard movie agent and a plate of lasagna drying on the back seat of my minivan where one of my children left it,” she reveals.

“I fulfilled my original contract with Simon & Schuster, and now my agent is negotiating a new one. My price has gone up. Of course, it couldn’t have gone down.”

But none of that means Holleman is rolling in dough. “They tell me in New York City and Hollywood I’m their rising star. But I’m three months behind in my phone bill. I’m busted. Broke.”

Although “Killer Gorgeous” is her first published novel, Holleman has been turning out manuscripts for years. But they didn’t sell.

She says agent Robin Rue took one epic all over New York, but publishers rejected it with similar comments: “This is good, but where do I put it? What do I call it? How do I market it?”

It had everything but a plot, observed Rue.

“Try to write a little murder ditty and let’s see what happens,” the agent suggested. Or, put another way: “I can show you the money if you can show me the plot.”

Working late at night after the children were asleep, or during the alternate weeks when the kids were with their father, Holleman began writing “stories with plots.”

And she wrote about Texas.

“It seemed to work,” she says. “It took me 10 years to figure out that the plot should be based on the life story I know, which is Texas. I quit trying to write out of my element.”

And as the ex-wife of a criminal attorney, she knows Texas cops.

“They all wear boots and Stetsons and have a sense of frontier justice,” she says, laughing. “And Robin said New York loves Texans, although not necessarily in a benevolent way.”

A Fort Worth native and a journalism graduate of Texas Christian University, Holleman dabbled in public relations and spent several years knocking out award-winning humor columns for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

But writing books was always her goal.

“I wanted to do this more than I wanted to be married to a rich man, to have a nanny, a housekeeper and a woman that cooked. I had that. None of it made me happy.”

Just recently, Holleman took on a temporary “day job” with the Grapevine Sun, a twice weekly newspaper where she writes human interest features for $7 an hour.

“My garage door is broken, we can’t use my middle bathroom because it won’t flush and you can’t believe what I’ve hocked. Everything you see on me right now is from a secondhand store,” she confesses lightly.

Aside from the evil Marshall Robbins, there is little male-bashing in “Killer Gorgeous.” It turns on a novel twist: Beautiful but ruthlessly abused Allison Robbins wants to die but doesn’t have the courage to kill herself.

She goes in search of a hit man. This is the scene where she finds one: “She said only, ‘Hi,’ from behind him, and then a plume of blue-gray smoke shot over his shoulder. He whipped around, the Browning straight between her brows like a flaming arrow. They were speechless an eternal thirty seconds. From the bar someone screeched a jazzy version of ‘Betcha, by Golly Wow.’

“‘I was wondering,’ she said, and her red shiny lips made firefly patterns in the neon blinks, ‘if you would kill me, please.”’

Fortunately, the hit man is too busy killing other folks to kill Allison. Also, he’s not too keen on snuffing the wife of a very rich, menacing and vindictive prosecutor.

So what if “Killer Gorgeous” really clicks?

“It’s going to really click,” she snaps. “It’s fast. Dirty. Sensual. Funny. Small. And it’s $5.99. There’s nothing about that book not to love.”

And what if “Killer Gorgeous,” “Hell’s Belle” and “Necessary Evil” sell like crazy? Then what?

“Then I pay my phone bill,” she says.