Putting on the Ritz

Book excerpt: Following the hilarious debacle of Blue Heaven, librettist Philip Cavanaugh has again allowed himself to be drawn into a fiendish money-making plan by his friend and ex-lover Gilbert Selwyn. Gilbert has fallen in with Tommy Parker, a veritable Adonis and a magazine editor employed by media magnate Boyd Larkin. Philip's brief is to spy on Larkin's greatest adversary Peter Champion. To this end Philip enters the Champion entourage - a clan so poisonous they make the Borgias look Amish - with his songwriting partner Claire. Together they are to turn Champion's talentless wife Ilsa (a woman so rich she 'ovulates Fabergé eggs') into a chanteuse. As Philip and Gilbert out-spy each other in vying for Tommy's admiration, plot follows counter-plot in a novel whose comic complications, devastating repartee and cast of high-hat lowlifes is nothing short of dazzling and unforgettable.