THE BEST LAID PLANS Sidney Sheldon Harper Collins, $195 Now, at last, I understand why airport bookshops are filled with Sidney Sheldon novels.
After tackling The Best Laid Plans in three hours flat, unquestionably it's fluffy reading fodder, ideal for a not-too-long flight while still leaving time for a quick 40 winks.
I must confess I had forgotten reading Master of the Game, another Sheldon novel, when as a spotty, hormone-charged adolescent I pinched it from my elder sister in the belief it was hot stuff.
How wrong I was.
Sheldon tends only to offend in terms of his bland approach - of good versus evil, beauty over ugliness, right over wrong. The storyline of The Best Laid Plans is hardly original, and the prose chokes with cliches. All good, easily readable stuff.
Leslie is blonde, bold, beautiful and abandoned by her father. She is also maddeningly smug, because, you see, she knows she is far more intelligent than the rest of the human race. She has an IQ of 170, for heaven's sake.
Eventually, she finds true happiness in the creepy Oliver - a madly successful lawyer. In the novel's opening sentence, she writes breathlessly: 'Dear Diary: This morning I met the man I am going to marry.' Of course, weeks later he offers to do just that. Her reply - 'That'll do nicely' - sums up the situation as if it were, well, a transaction with an American Express card. All the while we wonder: can Leslie really be so smart? After all, she's known the man five minutes and heard of his 'ladies' man' reputation.
