"Humorous relationship romp"

The son of a Congressman, attorney Greg Munson fails to show up at the altar, jilting Ginger Petrocelli. Greg's family files a missing person report so NYPD investigates. Detective Nick Wojowoski visits Ginger to question her about her vanished fiancé, but she offers nothing except a memory. Nick and Ginger shared sex years ago, but though he would like to have another go she would not.

Greg calls his parents and Ginger to say he is okay and is not dead or kidnapped, but that he suffered cold feet at the last moment. Ginger moves on, emotionally stable, until she loses her Manhattan apartment that she sublets from Anne Murphy when the woman abruptly returns from Hollywood to do the soaps. The loss of her apartment is more devastating than the demise of her engagement. Because of costs to rent in Manhattan, Ginger moves in with her hippie mom and ethnic grandmother making for three generations of women struggling not to kill each other. Meanwhile Nick begins making inroads towards having a relationship with Ginger.

LOOSE SCREWS is a humorous relationship romp starring an engaging lead character struggling to sever herself from her blood relations. The story line is fun to read as Ginger feels like hiding in a bag when her mother blows off other people or her grandmother acts so old world Italian. Nick is a hunk who provides the romantic element to a warm relationship drama.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted August 10, 2002

Summary

In the space of a few hours, thirty-year-old Ginger Petrocelli had gone from bride-to-be to bride-who-never- was. So here she sat, alone in her cramped apartment, wedding crinolines askew, drowning her sorrows in a hundred- dollar bottle of Veuve Cliquot, when her doorbell rang. And her trip to hell in a handbasket was about to escalate. At the door: Nick, Ginger's "first." Only, he's a police officer now, and he wants to find out what she knows about her M.I.A. congressman fiance. When was the last time she'd seen him? She'd better not leave town . . . And the spiral continues: her cozy little sublet (really, she liked having her shower in the kitchen) is about to be yanked away, and the prestigious little design firm where she works is about to go belly-up. So what's a girl to do? Her answer, born of desperation: move in with her crazy, widowed mother -- who Ginger claims sucks the life force out of every creature within one city block of her -- and her grandmother, who spends much of her day engaged in heated arguments with her dead husband. Well, it's a plan. But bizarrely, as the summer progresses, her eccentric but lovable relatives give her the courage to make choices based on what she wants, not what she wants to avoid.