The Thrill of It All - Christie Ridgeway

I had such high hopes, after so unexpectedly enjoying Ridgeway's other novel, that the direness of The Thrill of It All came as an even greater shock. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Shopping network star Felicity Charm is on top of the world - she's GetTV's best-selling host, hunky producer Drew's increasingly interested, and she's just won a Joanie award at the Electronic Retail Association's annual awards night. She's even created a fictional version of her own, embarrassing and felonious family - an Aunt and Uncle with a far more impressive pedigree than the feckless Charms possess. But on this night of triumph she's sucked back into the morass she tried to leave behind - her cousin Ben's missing, and there are toughs looking for him.
Felicity heads back to Half Palm, the town she tried to leave behind, in her brand new Thunderbird - a prize that came with the Joanie. En route her car spins out of control, crashing with the only other vehicle within miles - Michael Magee's pickup. Injured in the crash, Felicity stops breathing - clinically dead, she has a near-death experience, seeing the parents who died when she was only a small child - and is resuscitated by Michael. Giddy with the brush with death, Michael and "Lissie" have earth-moving sex before heading their separate ways, which turn out not to be so separate after all.
And we're only 53 pages into a 372 page novel. In the following pages we encounter Felicity's widowed sister; her dead husband Simon's mountaineering partners, the wheelchair-bound Pete and (surprise!) Magee; and the Mafioso with whom Ben has became embroiled.
In places this reads like a poor man's Welcome to Temptation (by Jennifer Cruisie), and it's so category I struggled to keep reading. The heroine behaves irrationally and doesn't communicate. The hero is alpha-male, tortured and in denial. The sex is (allegedly) hot and frequent, but the communication is sparse and inadequate. The conflict is minor and phony. The secondary romance is obvious and predictable. The endearments are nauseating - I actually threw the book across the room after reading one too many 'dollface's - and the occasional Australianisms (Simon was an Aussie) are obviously penned by a non-Australian because they're just not right. I'm glad I read this after the other Ridgeway novel, because this way I may read something else by her. Perhaps. - Alex