Have you ever read a novel about the intrigues behind the scenes of TV world? Well, the plot of Private Scandals follows the same cliches.However, Ms. Roberts' way of handling characters make the reading of Private Scandals worth your while.Angela Perkins is your standard "old star", she's beautiful (but aging), successful and hard as nails.Deanna Reynolds is the proverbial rising star. She's fresh, caring, smart and pretty too boot. This is not the case of "Something about Eve", but the other way around.Finn Riley is the very sexy journalist caught in the web (an echo of Murphy Brown's Peter).The plots takes us trough the rivalry between those two strong women, with an extra twist of a crazed stalker obsessed with Deanna.This novel is not quite up to Nora Roberts usual standards, but it makes for a few hours of great fun.

I barely made it through it. Sadly, I found all the characters extremely annoying...especially the bland too-goody-goody-trying-to-be-tough heroine, which was a shame as I thought the book's setting in the world of television an interesting subject. The stalker was too blatantly obvious and the whole book seemed to go on F-O-R-E-V-E-R. Also, like another reviewer stated, the narrator (Julie Finneran) was herself annoying which didn't help my overall experience.

I enjoyed this book. If you are close minded and don't want to research about the origins of Jesus or the New Testament, then skip this. If you care about your faith enough to make sure it holds water, then this is a good start. It's simple and direct. The author covers all the bases, but it's up to the reader to take this information and explore it further when the book is completed. I was a Christian for 30 years and it was books like this that helped me realize that, though there may be a God, the Christian faith doesn't hold the keys to understanding that God. If you want to find, you have to look.

I find the dogmatic way that people hold on to their myths to be mildly amusing until this dogma begins to corrupt the "real" world as we are seeing in 2012. This book should be read by every teen in the world before they are completly infected by the disease of Christianity. If people would read the Gospels and understand that there are actually three different Jesus characters, one full of angst, one almost Zen like, and John's rather bullish Jesus. The synoptic gospels are all simply re-writes of a central incorrect history/novel of the central character of Jesus. John's author takes the story on a wildly different path over a completely different time line. READ AND THINK PEOPLE instead of relying on others to feed you what they would have you believe. Faith is truly the culmination of things unseen or perhaps of things unwilling to be seen.

I was very disappointed because the author presents a thought-provoking theory but offers no proof. Instead of proofs the author uses assumptions that are unsupported by facts. This reads more as a manifesto of ideas rather than any treatise on the existence of Jesus.

While not emtirely without merit, and the introuction providing a worthy introduction to the 'Jesus-as-a-myth' meme, most of this book is speculation better suited to the Zeitgeist crowd. It would do one better to read Israel Finklestein.