There were seven of them, that white-hot summer at Malibu, with seven different deadly desires, each primed for explosion - and each focused on the love-hungry, destruction-hungry woman who called herself Star Osborne.

Star had a few desires of her own, none of them very pretty, and when she hurled them headlong at the seven vacationers, there was hardly time enough - even before the corpse showed up - to discover who was really the deadliest of the deadly.