Best Laid Plans »

Sidney Sheldon's remarkable career as a novelist began when he was 50 years old, after he had already been a success in film and television. Perhaps it was his sensibility for screen entertainment that made him so readily able to produce his addictive novels of love and suspense.

The first entry in Leslie Stewart's diary read: Dear Diary; This morning I met the man I am going to marry. It was simple, optimistic statement, without the slightest portent of the dramatic chain of events that was about to occur. The Best Laid Plans tells the explosive story of the beautiful and ambitious Leslie Stewart, who learns that for some men power is the greatest aphrodisiac, and of Oliver Russell, the handsome governor of a small southern state, who finds out why hell has no fury like a woman scorned. With the unexpected twists and turns that are the hallmark's of his mega-bestselling novels, Sidney Sheldon spins a tale of two equally determined people headed on a collision course. Oliver has a strategy to win the White House; Leslie has a scheme to make him wish he's never been born. They both should have known that even the best-laid plans can go dangerously astray.with deadly consequences. The Best Laid Plans takes listeners inside two of America's most powerful...

Publishers Weekly

Washington politics, a jilted woman's revenge and the war in Bosnia plague an idealistic but lecherous president in Sheldon's latest tale of beautiful people, money and deception. On his way up the ladder of success, Oliver Russell breaks his engagement to Leslie Stewart, a stylish, intelligent public relations executive who knows how to nurture a grudge. Leslie marries a rich old man, turns her husband's fortune into a news empire, waits to go after Oliver until he occupies the White House and then hits him with every scandal-ridden headline she can muster. Sheldon ("Morning, Noon, and Night", etc.) peoples his story with familiar yet colorful supporting characters: the old-style back-room politician, the go-getter young journalist, the self-serving spin-doctor. The plot twists will fool very few readers, yet they manage to keep the pages turning, while scenes like the first encounter between the journalist and the Bosnian orphan boy she takes into her care are touching despite their unoriginality. In short, Sheldon once again proves himself the master of the made-for-TV novel. The vindictive heroine, a cross between Katharine Graham and Farrah Fawcett, provides the one special element that sets this work apart from other easily read and easily forgotten fiction by this eternally bestselling writer. Literary Guild selection.