Reviewed by: Catherine Baksi
Author: Penny Avis and Joanna Berry
Publisher: Matador
ISBN: 978-1848766-617
Price: £6.99

Alex Fisher is a high-flying lawyer close to making partner at City firm MacArthur Warren. A chance meeting with an old boyfriend provides the opportunity for her to secure a deal for the firm on the sale of a leading cosmetic surgery business that could help her chances.

Despite leaving a drunken telephone message for the surgery’s finance director, Alex is invited to pitch for the deal, which she wins.

Working on site at the cosmetic surgery clinic, Alex finds herself spending most of her waking hours with Dan, a hot shot junior whom, not to put too fine a point on it, she fancies the pants off.

Her chances of partnerships and her team’s bonuses are dependant on the sale of the cosmetic practice going ahead, but during their due diligence Alex and Dan discover a secret celebrity client list, a dishonest surgeon and a botched boob job that must be kept out of the press and neutralised at all costs.

Away from the office Alex is busy planning the perfect wedding, complete with unicorns, to her musician boyfriend Elliott.

Elliott however shows little interest in either his fiancee or their wedding plans, and when Alex discovers he had invited his bandmates on their honeymoon and slept with a groupie, she has some thinking to do.

Alex, is the fist of four books in the Never Mind the Botox series, featuring the lives of four professional women working on the sale of the Beau Street Group cosmetic surgery practice.

Each book charts the weeks in their lives spent working on the sale, showing how they mix their personal with their working lives – a genre that could be classified as ‘professional chick-lit’.

Alex was a quick and enjoyable little read. The protagonists are believable if slightly one-dimentional or caricatured – from the brusque female partner who has smashed her way through the glass ceiling only to repair it with toughened glass to hinder others of her sex from joining her, to the red-braces-wearing, game-playing, irascible, sushi-demanding US lawyer.

The plot and links between the unlikely bunch of characters seem somewhat contrived in order to make the story work and tie up all the lose ends.

But co-authored by a lawyer and an accountant, the descriptions of the hours spent holed up in the basement of the client’s office scrutinising files, with late-night takeaway pizza breaks, and the painful firm team-building weekend with the dilemma over what to wear, will doubtless ring true for many City lawyers fortunate enough to be able to set aside draft contracts for a minute and pick up this book.

Catherine Baksi is reporter at the Gazette

Topics