THE BEST LAID PLANS

A financially strapped Upper East Side lady-who-lunches launches an escort service employing only women over 40 in this unfunny novel from Schnurnberger (co-author: The Men I Didn’t Marry, 2007, etc.).

The name-dropping, of both brands (Ambien) and celebrities (Mayor Bloomberg, Jay-Z), begins on the first page as wealthy matron Tru Newman throws a disastrous benefit soiree at the Museum of Natural History. Shortly after the tainted appetizers send guests running to the exits, Tru learns that her husband Peter has been laid off from his job as an investment banker. How will they afford their penthouse apartment and the tuition for the private school their twin 14-year-old daughters attend? Not to mention the Botox injections (by the author’s actual dermatologist). When Tru’s best friend Sienna, also out of work as a newscaster, refuses the check Peter’s young lawyer Bill offers her as a gift after a romantic tryst, Tru has an epiphany: There’s an open niche in the escort industry—successful young men like Bill who are drawn to sophisticated older women. Tru, Bill and Sienna open the Veronica Agency, named after a 16th-century courtesan, but Tru neglects to tell Peter, who begins working for their sexy new neighbor Tiffany, a business owner. The success of the Veronica Agency does not mitigate Tru’s growing suspicion that Tiffany has romantic designs on Peter. Soon Tru’s 72-year-old mother Naomi, a former Miss Subway, suffers a minor heart attack and the twins join forces against a two-timing eighth-grade Romeo. After a marital spat, Peter leaves on a ten-day business trip with Tiffany to Hawaii. But not to worry—by the night of Naomi’s Miss Subways’ reunion, where Cher plays an inexplicable cameo, Peter and Tru have rediscovered marital bliss, Sienna and Bill have found new love, and so has Naomi with her first suitor. As for the Veronica Agency, Tru realizes she wouldn’t want her daughters working there.

A distasteful mix of flat one-liners, sexual innuendo, base materialism and sentimentality.