SHARING SEAN

Four London women conspire to share the alliteratively available Sean.

First-timer Pye’s four heroines have the requisite wildly divergent backgrounds. Lily is the American expat creator of a hugely successful BBC comedy series; Mara, the disowned daughter of an Indian appliance magnate; Terry, Liverpudlian runaway turned London double-decker driver, and Jules, a Chelsea event planner who went AWOL from her destined marriage to an earl. The four have been friends since their early days of “slender means,” and now our Brit chicks, all survivors of bad relationships, are in the late-30s’ zone where their male companionship needs teeter on the brink of going forever unmet. So Lil concocts a scheme—she wants just two nights a week of uncomplicated sex from her latest squeeze, Sean, a builder-developer who specializes in rehabbing industrial space into lofts. The quartet can “share Sean,” each according to her wont: sperm for Jules; male influence for Paul, Terry’s teenaged son whose absentee father reappeared long enough to lapse into a cirrhotic coma. Widowed Mara opts out. Once a call girl, she, with her two daughters, clings to penury, trying to stave off a custody suit by prejudiced in-laws. Sean, whose unwitting compliance bespeaks a certain willed ignorance essential to the plot, impregnates Jules, befriends Paul, and is drawn to Terry, whose class origins approximate his. Mara is disabused of her remaining illusion, and Jules’s miscarriage follows her harridan mummy’s harangue—coincidence? Terry and Sean telegraph missed signals, and as Lil’s nonchalance gives way to dog-in-the-mangering, the quartet spins apart. But even a desultory tabloid exposé can’t postpone the happy dénouement indefinitely, and before you can say, “Cheers, babe,” the group reunites for yet more glasses of bubbly, unencumbered by any suggestion that the characters, or plot, which has as many exposed struts as one of Sean’s lofts, could benefit from a stint in rehab.

Suspense driven primarily by characters’ blind spots still makes for a Teflon-slick beach read.