Danielle Steel, America's number-one best-selling novelist, has held millions spell-bound with such novels as Family Album, Full Circle, and Changes. But with Secrets she takes her readers beyond the tightly knit world of the family, into the heart of the nation's most glamorous industry: television.

Here is the drama behind the creation of Manhattan, a first-of-its-kind prime-time television series produced by Melvin Wechsler. Tempered by tragedy, seasoned by success, a man with a Midas touch, Mel Wechsler will assemble a dazzling cast:

Sabina Quarles at forty-five has managed to maintain-by dint of spunk and surgery-the body of an eighteen-year-old. Tough, spirited, and self-sufficient, she has survived twenty years in Hollywood, never marrying, never quite succeeding, never deigning to work in television. Yet Manhattan may bring her both the stardom she craves-and the security her very special needs require.

Jane Adams is an earthy thirty-nine-year-old beauty. Devoted to her children, dominated by her abusive and violent husband, forced to choose between her husband and her acting career, Jane may find that her role in Manhattan has cost her everything that matters most.

Zack Taylor, the leading man, is a paragon of professionalism. Yet beyond the smooth good looks, the easy warmth, and the slick charm of the eligible bachelor, he remains an enigma.

The charming ingenue, Gabrielle Thornton-Smith, seems to have appeared out of the blue. Beautiful, talented and on the brink of success at twenty-five, what can she have to hide?

And Bill Warwick, plucked from the ranks of struggling young actors, is now slated to be the nation's new heartthrob. But he has lied about one issue in his background. Not only will Bill's future hang in the balance, but the success of the whole series may be jeopardized when he is forced publicly to confront the consequences of his little white lie.

Set in Los Angeles and New York, Secrets carries the reader behind the scenes into the making of a major television series. Probing even deeper beneath the polished surfaces, Danielle Steel explores the dilemmas both men and women, in and out of the searchlight of the media, confront today. She paints a vivid, compelling picture of a sophisticated world and the surprisingly real problems of the people who inhabit it.

Here Danielle Steel delineates her richest and most complex cast of characters, people forced together by extraordinary circumstances who must perform even when they're torn apart by their deepest secrets.