BAD HEIR DAY

Girl-meets-earl fantasy from a very funny British novelist.

Anna Farrier is 22 and an Oxbridge graduate who longs to be a writer, though she’s been rejected by publisher after publisher. And now Sebastian, the handsome, womanizing heir to a sewage-company fortune who let her move into his posh London flat, has rejected her too. At a weekend wedding in Scotland he even beds a beautiful guest, but Anna gets too drunk to care. She’s busy flirting with Jamie Angus (a laird she mistakes for a waiter) and giggling with Geri, a gorgeous consultant who advises Anna to become a writer’s assistant. Back in London, Anna puts up a situation-wanted notice, and Cassandra Knight, a best-selling romance novelist suffering from writer’s block, answers it. Anna soon figures out that Cassandra, a witchy alcoholic who’s clawing her way up the social ladder, is really looking for a nanny for her young son Zak. Still temporarily homeless, Anna takes the job, though she hates it. Besides the unspeakably naughty Zak, there’s Cassandra’s repellent husband, an over-the-hill rock star named Jett, who stomps around wearing only a leopard-print thong while he plots his comeback. A few weeks of comical martyrdom among England’s new social elite pay off when Anna runs into Jamie Angus again at an upscale kiddy party and discovers at last that he’s a real, live laird—and apparently madly in love with her. The two run off to his moldering ancestral castle, aptly named Dampie and staffed with bizarre family servants. But Anna is miserable—until she meets local poet Robert MacAskill, tall, rugged, sexy, intelligent, and attractively modest—as befits the son of an earl.

The whimsical ingenuity of P.G. Wodehouse meets the sex-o-matic action of Jackie Collins. Holden (Simply Divine, 1999) stays in control of her supercharged farce all the way, though, even when a host of hysterically funny secondary characters almost steal the show.