FICTION

WINDMILLS OF THE GODS by Sidney Sheldon (Morrow: $18.95; 384 pp.). Mary Ashley, whose gorgeous looks and down-home manner belie her iron will, is plucked from the obscurity of small-town Kansas as the chosen instrument of newly elected President Paul Ellison’s innocent-sounding “people-to-people” program, which for some reason is dedicated to improving relations with Romania, Albania and other nations. But a lethal international conspiracy of right- and left-wing fanatics works to defeat his aims, and poor Mary is their main target.

Their real goal, of course, is to give some semblance of plot to this silly novel by the prolific author of “The Other Side of Midnight.” Despite Sidney Sheldon’s furious padding and television pacing, the book is only slightly entertaining, and literature it ain’t. The flimsy premise and even flimsier characters are equally underdeveloped, and nobody’s motivation is terribly clear, except maybe Sheldon’s.

Still, “Windmills” is a mercifully quick read, an ideal airplane book. Readers who are not behind bars, stranded on a desert island, or accepting money to read this book are urged to skip ruthlessly, and then to atone by contemplating the gratuitous martyring of trees that went into it. But Sheldon’s loyal fans probably will snap up a zillion copies anyway, proving once again that inveighing against “Windmills” will always be quixotic.