EXIT STRATEGIES

Love, money, a cranky teenaged daughter, and an even crankier octogenarian mother are but a few of the problems facing a recent (at fortysomething) law school grad.

A younger heroine might have fallen prey to Bridget Jones plotting, but Miss Jones never had to worry about her mother’s hip replacement surgery. Nevertheless, Becky Weston, struggling to earn respect as a new associate at her law firm (it doesn’t help that she spent the previous six years there as a receptionist) and fighting the crush she has on her dashing boss are familiar takes on the single-woman-makes-good theme—though Becky, older and wiser, spends less time worrying about the size of her thighs and more about the size of her kids’ college fund. Warned that she’ll need to start accruing billable hours at the firm, Becky suddenly finds herself with the famous Bobbie Crystol, anti-aging guru, as a client. Long-ago college acquaintances who still have little love for each other, Becky wonders why Bobbie would choose an inexperienced lawyer like herself to guide a million-dollar fountain-of-youth empire. Other mysteries are afoot as Becky’s ex-husband’s widow Carole (the trustee of her children’s inheritance) suddenly claims a substantial loss in the trust, while, inexplicably, Becky keeps running into her ex-therapist, a kindly man always around at just the right time. In this amiable, if not particularly compelling narrative, Becky’s life gets a lot worse before it gets better: nursing homes, financial fraud, life-threatening quackery—and more—rear their ugly heads before Becky manages to put the seemingly disparate pieces of her life’s disorder together. The Cinderella ending, though, is a bit more than the story needs.

A quick and likable, though not much more, hardcover debut: a good airplane book.