TOO DAMN RICH
by Judith Gould
Two-dimensional escapist fiction from Gould (Forever, 1992, etc.)a wedding of Judith Krantz and Sidney Sheldonenlivened by the author's spirited heroines and her deliciously dishy view of life at the top. Dina Goldsmith, wife of overweight billionaire Robert Goldsmith, wears mittens to bed to keep her hands soft. The former Miss Gouda, Dina clawed her silk-wrapped nails from Dutch cheese to a 34-room penthouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, all the while clinging to her vulgarian spouse Robert, the founder of a chain of discount stores who misses his old recliner and likes oral sex with women in corsets. Dina's pal Zandra von Hohenburg-Willemlohe, a penniless countess whose family descends from the Holy Roman Emperors, comes to New York to escape from the thugs who burnt her arm with a lighted cigar because her brother Rudolph welshed on a debt. Dina finds Zandra a job at husband Robert's latest acquisition: Burghley's auction house, founded in 1719, where Zandra befriends Kenzie Turner, a feisty Old Masters specialist who, though penniless, has a great body and an eye for quality (Kenzie found a Givenchy for $35 at the Salvation Army). Meanwhile, as readers vicariously drink Cristal, a black-clothed mastermind is plotting the crime of the millennium (not revealed for 400 pages), to be pulled off at Burghley's. Will this force of darkness win out? Can Kenzie choose between her two loversone an NYPD art-squad detective, the other his Finnish Interpol partner? Will Zandra marry her cousin, another billionaire, His Serene Highness Karl- Heinz von und zu Engelwiesen, who needs a male heir to inherit the family fortune and three lawyers to witness its birth? A humdinger view of a privileged universe. What it lacks in suspense, it makes up for in silk-covered walls and bibelots.