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Pink fluffy candy floss and marshmallows, along with sexy stilettos and crisp new dollar bills! That is what comes to my mind when I look at the cover of Richard Weber's MISS GAZILLIONS. Daniel O'Sullivan thought that he had it all until his father dies rather suddenly. Deprived of the yacht where he has spent the last twenty years of his indolent life in the Caribbean by his father's creditors, he finds himself back in Brooklyn working as a landlord for the creditors as compensation. At the funeral, he meets his father's rather eccentric mistress who informs him that it is up to him to fulfil his late father's last wish -- to be buried at sea. O'Sullivan spends his time thinking of ingenious ways in which to get back to the Caribbean as soon as possible. However, just when he thinks that he will never make it back to paradise Celeste Trantor, one of his tenants, comes into his life with a bang. She's the only survivor of a car crash that kills a number of important people, one of them being a drug lord, and she winds up in O'Sullivan's apartment with two bags packed to overflowing with money. Soon the two of them find themselves zigzagging their way across some of the most exotic places in the world assisted by the elegant and somewhat peculiar Lydia (his father's former mistress) and her current lover -- a defrocked Italian Catholic Cardinal with some rather strange business interests and habits. A wacky and somewhat tall tale, MISS GAZILLIONS is on the one hand a laugh out loud story that will make you shake your head and on the other it will irritate the hell out of you when you least expect it. As amusing, as this book is do not expect too much from it. There is no character development and O'Sullivan comes across as a rather weak-willed man who will believe anything a pretty woman tells him. Weber has created some memorable characters and scenes, including the pick-up service that is run by the mobster Tony Dee. For me the best character is not Celeste but in fact Lydia. In her periods of lucidity, she comes up with some cracking one-liners. MISS GAZILLIONS is a light, frothy read that will not disappoint you if that is what you are looking for. This definitely comes under the realm of light entertainment.
Reviewed by Ayo Onatade, April 2005
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