Here's a smart, bitchy and hilarious new release that's a worthy addition to any summer reading list:

My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan
(Little, Brown and Company, $24.95)

Joe Keenan’s My Lucky Star is a brilliant sitcom disguised as a novel.
Free from the hassle of commercial interruptions, the Emmy-winning writer and producer for Frasier fills 357 pages with catty characters, convoluted plot twists and, best of all, impossibly witty banter. Hollywood phonies are an easy target, but seldom have they been skewered with such giddy delight.
My Lucky Star follows Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz in Keenan’s series of books about gay songwriter and playwright Philip Cavanaugh and his pals Gilbert and Claire. You don’t need to read the first two entries in the Cavanaugh chronicles to reap the pleasures of My Lucky Star since Keenan generously fills us in on the backstory.
Combining the plucky intrigue of a Nancy Drew mystery, the biting satire of Sunset Blvd. and raunchy gay sex, Keenan peels back Hollywood’s sunny façade to reveal the arrogance, vanity and idiocy that lurk just barely beneath the surface. At the outset of the story, Philip works as a lowly courier in Manhattan because his plays keep on flopping. Enter his friend and ex-boyfriend Gilbert, who cooks up a scheme to bring Philip and his writing partner, Claire, out to Hollywood to write a screenplay.
The good news is that Philip and Claire get to adapt a novel (albeit a terrible one) for a Oscar-winning Hollywood diva and her closeted superstar son, Stephen. But due to Gilbert’s inept wheeling and dealing, Philip must also go undercover to ghostwrite the memoirs of the diva’s despised sister.
Screwball scandal erupts when Stephen gets caught up in a lurid incident involving a happy ending masseur, a hustler dressed like an Oscar statuette, video cameras and copious amounts of anal sex.
When Stephen tries to dodge blame for his indiscretion, Gilbert zings back, “You’re the one who decided to throw an open house in his ass!” Very few pages go by without this sort of exquisitely bitchy dialogue.
The novel disappoints in the final 50 pages, where the ridiculous and tedious plot twists make Three’s Company look subtle. Otherwise you couldn’t ask for a funnier or more enjoyable read.