A.K.A. SHEILA DOYLE

Once upon a time, Sheila Ryan was an aspiring actress—all right, her experience was limited to a single adult film—and acting teacher. On the day her friends take her to a Fort Lauderdale strip club to celebrate her divorce from Scott McKenzie, Esq., though, one of the male dancers catches her eye, and vice versa. Next morning she wakes up in bed with Robert Roberts (“Bobby Squared”), and from then on, nothing in her life is routine. When he’s not honing his solo skills on the dance floor, Bobby and his partner Solomon Bilstein, a.k.a. Sol Rogers, make a living as freelance couriers of guns and money (“Drugs?” “Not if I can help it”)—a profession that guarantees an eventful lifestyle for themselves, Bobby’s dog Hoshi, and the newly made-over Sheila, who feels so little like the old gray Sheila that she celebrates by dubbing herself Sheila Doyle. Embroiled as innocent middlemen in a gun-selling deal between exiled Cuban gangster Juan Jose Medina and Reverend Tom Miller, or the Aryan Mountain Kirk, Bobby and Sol manage to get on Medina’s bad side. But although the fearsome ganglord dedicates himself to their destruction, memoirist Jordan (A Nice Tuesday, 1999, etc.) provides only a season’s worth of glamorous, fast-moving, weightless TV intrigue, TV dialogue, and cable-TV sex, all aimed squarely at the 12-to-18-year-old male demographic that doesn’t read all that many novels.

Still, you’ve got to have a warm spot for a thriller in which virtually everybody but the dog has at least one alias.