Your connecting flight has been delayed another three hours, and you feel as if you are getting a lavender tan from the lighting. You are buzzed on cardboard coffee and too woozy from an airborne snackoid served on your incoming flight to risk alcohol. But do you despair? Of course you do. Do you give up? Certainly, by reaching into your flight bag and withdrawing one of this season's airport novels. You know the kind. Literary wide-bodies with plenty of plot that allow you to leave the real world in the first half paragraph and stay away through several flight-delay announcements. No-qual prose and cereal-box characters are customary, though an occasional lapse into good writing does no harm. The Odyssey and Moby Dick, both wide-bodies before their time, would have been perfect airport novels. Herewith a random grab of half a dozen new airporters, none written by Homer or Herman Melville:
LADY BOSS, by Jackie Collins (Simon & Schuster; 608 pages; $21.95), offers the reader a rare opportunity to watch adverbs mate. "Slowly, languorously" the naughty parts of speech tumble about during the sex scenes. But why aren't the scenes sexier? Never mind. The point of the story is to watch "darkly, exotically" beautiful but ruthless, yet sensitive and vulnerable female tycoon Lucky Santangelo -- she heads a billion-dollar shipping company but doesn't seem to go to the office much -- knife her way to ownership of Panther films, a big Hollywood studio. This she does without telling her actor husband ("Lennie was tall and lanky, with dirty-blond hair and ocean-green eyes"), who is having contract troubles with Panther. Alas, she fails to consider that Lennie's fierce male pride will curdle when she reveals herself as his boss. Disaster! And he . . . And she . . .
MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT, by Sidney Sheldon (Morrow; 399 pages; $21.95), is one of a large and growing subgenre of evil-Greek-shipowner thrillers. Nasty fellows, those fictional Greek shipowners. This one, rich and loathsome Constantin Demiris, has arranged that his unfaithful mistress and her lover, Demiris' pilot, be executed for the supposed murder of the pilot's wife, beautiful, trusting American Catherine Alexander. But he is still angry, and he strides about his villa like Richard III, gloating in a long, italic aside about what he is going to do to Catherine, who lost her memory during a boat explosion and has been living in a rich, evil nunnery owned by Demiris. "It's too bad I can't afford to let her live," he whispers to empty air. "But first -- my vengeance I'm going to enjoy myself with her." Reading Sheldon's drivel offers an important reassurance: travelers who stick with Demiris and Catherine till the end can endure whatever misery the airlines throw at them.