My Gal Sunday

Imagine Nick and Nora Charles with a taste for politics and none for gin, and you'd be pretty close to Mary Higgins Clark's Henry Parker Britland IV and his attractive young wife, Sandra O'Brien Britland, known as Sunday. Henry, possessor of an enormous inherited fortune and known as one of America's sexiest men, has just finished his second term as president of the United States and is happily retired at 44, puttering around his New Jersey country estate. Sunday, who bootstrapped her way up from a modest working-class background, is a junior congresswoman with a reputation for smarts. The two met, romantically enough, on the eve of Henry's leaving office, fell madly in love, and were married six weeks later. In this collection of four pleasantly readable stories, the sleuthing duo catch the murderer of a statesman's flashy amour, endure Sunday's kidnapping and mastermind her rescue, solve the 34-year-old mystery of the disappearance of a foreign prime minister from the Britland family yacht, and reunite a ransomed boy with his parents at Christmas. Of the four, "They All Ran After the President's Wife" may be the best plotted, and has a particularly amusing McGuffin in the character of a caviar-loving terrorist. While the suspense is on the mild side throughout, the romance is lighthearted but sincere, and the occasional flashes of wit are dryly appealing. It's a bonbon, to be enjoyed for its brief sweetness. --Barrie Trinkle