Stolen Blessings by Lawrence Sanders
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"'McBryde, you ever been around the world?'
'No,' he says seriously, 'but I've been to Europe twice.'
She giggles at such innocence."

Why so many people are interested in celebrities has always been a mystery to me. Why do people find events in the life of, say, a Kardashian more interesting than termite farts? So any book that satirizes the ubiquitous celebrity cult has my pre-approval. In addition, I have a soft spot for Lawrence Sanders, mainly because of his Archy McNally series. I love the McNally novels because of the purposefully florid language and light, whimsical touch in handling sexual themes. Alas Stolen Blessings (1989) is an unmitigated failure. I kept reading, pretending that this is not just a very bad novel but a well executed parody of one.

Marilyn Taylor, also known as The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, a famous movie actress and the owner of Marilyn Taylor Enterprises, Inc. with offices, branches, and stores all over the country, arrives in New York to submit to a procedure in a fertility clinic. Her eggs will be retrieved for use in vitro to help a childless couple conceive.

But we know what happens to best-laid (my pun is of as stellar quality as the author's) plans... etc. Eggs may be subject to eggnapping. In fact, several teams of bad guys compete attempting to conclude the egghheist. But wait, not only bad guys are involved! Since Marilyn is a top-shelf celebrity CIA gets interested and the agency calls its involvement Operation Soufflé (wow, now that's a pun!) Middle East-based terrorist group, Arm of God, is also involved and some events in the plot take place in Cairo. Agents named Ptolemy, Ramses, and Tut are involved and the reader will be likely laughing louder here than in the passages which the author did intend as comedic.

The life of the entire country is paralyzed by the theft: journalists, academicians, church officials, government figures discuss the case. Everybody is watching the crisis on TV. Well, in fact, the entire world is following the case. After all, these are celebrity eggs. A detective from the New York Police Department - the same one who failed the urban dictionary test shown in the epigraph above - plays a major role in the plot and the denouement.

Hilarious last sentence is one of the funniest passages in the novel. But the best thing in this failure of a comedic parody of a thriller is the following passage:

"They move together, hands busy.
'You have beautiful dangling participles,' she murmurs.
'Thank you,' he says, 'and I love to split your infinitive.'"

Anyway, I will still be reaching for Lawrence Sanders' novels, looking for McNally quality of prose.

One-and-a-half stars.


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