GOD AND SARAH PEDLOCK

High shipboard romance, rhapsodic piano, and God--another absorbing installment in Long. street's Pedlock chronicle about a vastly wealthy Jewish family on the Eastern seaboard. Back again is the salty octogenarian (?) Judith Pedlock, now looking for a new husband to share her champagne and servants (she finds him in an elderly Jewish scholar, a plot twist that intersects starting with the first novel in the saga, The Pedlocks). Sharing the foreground is her niece Sarah, now undergoing a spiritual crisis in which she sees God on the ceiling whenever she's prone with her lovers. Sarah's a keyboard genius, right up there with Lenny and Van Cliburn in earnings, and something more--a Jewish saint. At fame's height, she goes through a manic-depressive cycle and gives up her piano to search for God. When a new lover at last brings her down to earth, she begins a demonic practice schedule for her comeback but has a heavenly seizure or illumination on the afternoon of her concert. Longstreet as always does a more substantial job than most and keeps his story moving even it if never quite clears the fast food kitchen where a pot is boiling.