The Misfortunes of Others

While Maya suffers through morning sickness and Bernard paints the nursery a chocolate brown, Snooky becomes involved in a romance and mischief. "You're pregnant, aren't you?" Maya Woodruff's peripatetic brother Snooky, calling collect from the French Antilles, makes this psychic diagnosis and instantly flies to Connecticut to offer a stuffed platypus, good cheer and gourmet cooking for the last seven months of his sister's ordeal. Her devoted, grumpy bear of a husband, Bernard, suffering his own labor pains from trying to deliver his latest children's book, is torn between his habitual hatred of all guests and his happy deliverance from the kitchen. (His coq au beer was not well received.) The misery of Maya's pregnancy, which makes the gestation of Rosemary's Baby look like a piece of cake, is compounded when her old friend Weezy becomes the target of an anonymous hate campaign by phone and mail. But Snooky takes charge with his usual endearing insouciance (not neglecting to fall madly in love along the way). It's great fun to have Bernard and Snooky, seen before in Friends Till the End, enlivening the sleuthing scene—this one without a homicide—again.