Have you been in the check out line and noticed the headlines on one of those Hollywood tabloid magazines? Covering the front page is usually some famous couple splitting up and it’s rarely pretty.

But wait. Wasn’t she married to some other famous man just last week? Wasn’t he in the arms of a different beautiful starlet?

Fame can lead to temptation, which can lead to hurt. In the new novel “The Other Side of Through” by Marsha D. Jenkins-Sanders, protagonist Katlyn doesn’t believe her heartthrob husband would cheat on her. Women throw themselves at him, but that would never faze him.

Would it?

Katlyn was used to having men flirt with her and she promised herself she would wait to settle down. When she met Justin Kinkaid, though, she fell for him hard. When he asked her to marry him, she was thrilled and loves being his wife. True, Katlyn fights jealousy when female fans flirt with her husband, but she knows Justin is trustworthy.

Felicia, Katlyn’s best friend, used to date a married man but he broke her heart. So when Terrell Sanders asked her out, she was cautious. What was a fine brother like Terrell doing with plain old Felicia when he could be dating any Atlanta belle?

Although Terrell didn’t want to settle down, he thought Felicia was close enough to “the one.” He carefully courted Felicia while he harbored a deep secret. But, as Felicia’s love life heated up, Katlyn’s fizzled. Katlyn discovered that Justin was cheating on her with a South American hootchie.

Justin thinks he might be in love with Nicola, his hot new girlfriend. Marriage to Katlyn was ho-hum, but to him there’s nothing boring about Nikki. Can Katlyn’s marriage be saved, or are she and Justin through?

The characters in “The Other Side of Through” are entirely believable and some are affable. The scenes are not contrived to the point where you’re rolling your eyes and sucking your teeth. The plot line is enough to hold your interest through 222 pages of twists and turns. Author Marsha D. Jenkins-Sanders is no Toni Morrison, but this is nowhere close to the worst novel I’ve ever read.

The problem with this book is that it suffers from inconsistent editing. There are pages filled with detail that have no bearing on the story. In one case, there’s a fascinating insight on Katlyn that went nowhere. In another case, a character was fleshed out and we never heard about him again. I thought everything ended too abruptly and could have, in fact, very easily been two books instead of one. Add a bunch of grammatical errors and you have a story that’s pretty decent, but is spoiled by something that a good editor could have fixed.

If you can overlook the flaws, then “The Other Side of Through” will entertain you all the way through. If you need your novels to be slicker, then this one will bug you up one side and down the other.