Peter Lefcourt: 4 books

Washed-up Hollywood producer Charlie Berns has mailed in his updated obit and is about to suck his Mercedes tailpipe and fade to black when a miracle materializes: his nephew, a wannabe screenwriter from New Jersey, has scripted the life story of Queen Victoria's prime minister Benjamin Disraeli,...

Retirement takes on new meaning in this hilarious work of poolside-noir where lust, greed, and murder collide in sunny Palm Springs, California. Sammy Dee is a mid-level Long Island mafioso in witness protection. Didier Onyekachukwu was the corrupt minister of finance of the former Upper Volta....

The sprawling narrative of five siblings, born in the 1940s, beginning on the day John Kennedy was shot and ending on 9/11. Between these two iconic dates, we follow the fortunes, love affairs, marriages, divorces, successes and failures of the Pearls, an immigrant Polish-Jewish family, from the Lower...

Barely four years after winning an Oscar, Charlie has sunk into the ranks of Hollywood bottom-feeders -- reduced to living in his nephew's pool house, kiting checks and taking the bus to his weekly Debtors Anonymous meeting, where he meets a mysterious ex-CIA agent who proposes to resuscitate Charlie's...