There's No Place Like the Ritz: 2

**From KIRKUS REVIEW:**

The title says it all: Winters (author of New York Magazine's Hotel Guide and a trendy travel-writer) takes the reader on a grand tour of the vexations that a rich girl has to undergo en route to four-star love. Oh, the vexations! The novel begins with a wail: Nanda Dobson, 43-year-old food-and travel-writer for some of New York's most chic magazines, has two houses, but her acquaintances, Marcella and the Baron, with whom she is chatting at a publicity party while they all sip Roederer Cristal champagne, have five! Can it be that Nanda, for ten years married to a rich alcoholic artist who recently has been growing fat and boorish (and impotent), is not doing right by herself? Her therapist, whom she visits four times a week by limousine, thinks so; but he's opposed to her solution, which soon becomes a compulsion: to seduce a gay cabaret singer named Tim Shea, who seems willing to stroke Nanda's chin (really!) in exchange for using her connections in the entertainment world (which soon take the two of them to first-class hotels and night spots all over Europe and South America), but not to ""fuck"" her, as Nanda has brought herself girlishly, self-mockingly, to call it. But then, of course, the therapist is in love with Nanda (as who isn't?), and so she discounts his advice. In fact, everyone is in love with Nanda!--everyone but that irresistible renegade Tim, who keeps slipping out of their shared suites in the Ritz and the Copacabana Palace to meet other men--and men who are not as attractive and well-dressed as Nanda is! Nanda, as she soon comes to believe, must be a woman who loves too much! But then, in London, while Tim is charming Princess Margaret with his singing at the splendid Splendide, Nanda gets her reward: she falls in love with a rich (richer, richest) heterosexual, and she finally gets you-know-what-ed! The really refreshing thing about this novel is that it has no social conscience! Nanda lives happily ever after, and the reader now knows what champagne to order at the Savoy. That's all, folks.