My Lucky Star » (Reprint)

A hilarious, laser-sharp Hollywood comedy - P.G. Wodehouse meets Christopher Buckley at the Oscars - from Joe Keenan, the Emmy-winning writer and producer of Frasier and author of the classic farce Blue Heaven.

The luckless writing team of Philip Cavanaugh and Claire Simmons is lured to Hollywood by their shifty pal Gilbert's offer of an improbably high-profile screenwriting gig. The job proves even more ill-gotten than they'd feared, but just as Claire packs her bags, enter sexy megastar Stephen Donato, the monarch of Philip's fantasies and a man with a Problem.

Stephen, secretly gay, has gotten wind of a memoir to be penned by his aunt Lily, a washed-up actress with more than enough TNT to blow the hinges off his closet. Philip, smitten, proposes a bargain: if they can write Stephen's next picture, Philip will do double duty as Lily's ghostwriter, providing Stephen a spy and an agent of influence in the enemy camp. What could go wrong?

Well, for starters there's the arrival of Moira Finch, the trio's old nemesis and as cunning a wolf as ever donned a sheep suit. Thanks to Moira's machinations, Philip soon finds himself center stage in a rapidly escalating fiasco involving call boys, blackmail, enraged publicists, vengeful DAs, and the single most ill-judged sex act a married megastar has ever committed. Written with the manic brilliance and nonstop hilarity Keenan brought to both his previous two Philip and Gilbert books and the dizzy farces he scripted for Frasier, My Lucky Star sends up Hollywood pretense higher than it's ever been sent before.

Publishers Weekly

In two earlier novels, Blue Heaven (1988) and Putting on the Ritz (1991), Keenan adapted and updated P.G. Wodehouse to his own original and side-splitting ends. Now, after a long hiatus largely spent as a writer and producer on the TV show Frasier, Keenan has produced a comic masterpiece that in intricacy of plotting and brilliance of language rivals the best of Wodehouse. Keenan sends his down-on-their-luck heroes-ordinary guy and narrator Philip Cavanaugh; Philip's unscrupulous pal and former lover, Gilbert Selwyn; and their brainy friend, Claire Simmons-to Hollywood, where Philip winds up helping aging has-been movie star, Lily Malenfant, pen her scandalous memoirs. In fact, Philip has been hired as a spy by Lily's more successful actress sister, Diana, and Diana's son, Stephen Donato, a closeted male action star, who both have good reason to fear the dirt Lily plans to dish. Enter the boys' nemesis from Blue Heaven, Moira Finch, and their fortunes plummet in a series of misadventures involving blackmail, male prostitutes, impersonating a police officer, and a sex act caught on videotape that's as audacious as it is hilarious. By the end, a vindictive DA thinks he has Philip and Gilbert at his mercy, but of course he didn't reckon with Claire, who comes up with a solution to their troubles worthy of that which Jeeves uses to save Bertie's neck in The Code of the Woosters. Hitherto marketed primarily to gay readers, Keenan deserves to win a large, appreciative audience of all sexual persuasions with this tour de force. Agent, Geri Thoma at the Elaine Markson Agency. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.