In bestselling author Christopher Buckley's hilarious novel, the President of the United States, ticked off at the Senate for rejecting his nominees, decides to get even by nominating America 's most popular TV judge to the Supreme Court.President Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees onto the Supreme Court. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill a Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won't have the nerve to reject her-Judge Pepper Cartwright, star of the nation's most popular reality show. Will Pepper, a vivacious Texan, survive a Senate confirmation battle? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature. Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule.

"Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies. But until now no one had actually compared him to Satan." They might as well have, though. "Gucci Goebbels," "yuppie Mephistopheles," and "death merchant" are just a few endearments Naylor has earned himself as the tobacco lobby's premier spin doctor. The hero of Thank You for Smoking does of course have his fans. His arguments against the neo-puritanical antismoking trends of the '90s have made him a repeat guest on Larry King, and the granddaddy of Winston-Salem wants him to be the anointed heir. Still, his newfound notoriety has unleashed a deluge of death threats. Christopher Buckley's satirical gift shines in this hilarious look at the ironies of "personal freedom" and the unbearable smugness of political correctness. Bracing in its cynicism, Thank You for Smoking is a delightful meander off the beaten path of mainstream American ethics. And despite his hypertension-inducing, slander-splattered, morally bankrupt behavior-which leads one Larry King listener to describe him as "lower than whale crap"-you'll find yourself rooting for smoking's mass enabler. -Rebekah Warren

Thanks to Hollywood and writers like Christopher Buckley, America has given the world a brand-new literary form: the revenge comedy. In the movies, maverick cops roam the world, taking names, kicking butts, and making wisecracks. For all the gore, pictures like Die Hard are essentially Road Runner cartoons with superior special effects. Audiences do more chuckling than gasping. Now comes former George Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley with a novelized version.Even though Wet Work isn't a movie yet, we're still talking extremely high concept: Lethal Weapon 2 meets The Emerald Forest, complete with nubile Amazonian love slaves flitting naked through the rain forest. But the real innovation in Buckley's work is sociological. Instead of an impertinent working stiff like your typical Mel Gibson-Bruce Willis-Michael Douglas character, Wet Work gives us a maverick plutocrat: a self-made billionaire defense contractor and friend of the President named Charley Becker.In addition to his finely engraved Purdy shotgun, Becker owns a custom- built yacht in the destroyer class equipped with an assault helicopter, manned by a trio of retired CIA killers named McNamara, Rostow, and Bundy, and decorated with original paintings by Manet. In the words of one of the archetypal fumbling bureaucrats who plays the inevitable foil, Charley Becker is ''the Rich Man's Bernhard Goetz.''It may bear mentioning that Buckley – whose previous novel, The White House Mess, was praised by many for its satire – is the son of the prolific conservative columnist and novelist William F. Also that the yacht, according to the acknowledgments page, is based on one owned by the late Malcolm Forbes and upon which the author once journeyed up the Amazon.As one would expect of such a concoction, Wet Work's plot moves smartly and preposterously along. First comes the obligatory death of an innocent, in this case Becker's beloved granddaughter, Natasha. Before her performance in an Off Broadway play about junkies, she succumbs to cardiac arrest after snorting cocaine furnished in the interest of realism by the director, who is also her lover. Finding the NYPD uninterested in solving the crime, Becker hires professional help and begins ''working [his] way up the food chain,'' from the cowardly director to his supplier, to the Miami importer to the dissolute Peruvian gangster – a left-winger, naturally – who set up the jungle lab that manufactured the stuff.At each step, in accordance with the iron laws of revenge comedy, the villains grow more villainous, the body count gets higher, the explosions get exponentially bigger, and Buckley's jokey, hyperbolic style becomes progressively more out of kilter. Caught in the open in a firefight, our hero feels ''as exposed as a referee at a tennis match, and surrounded by McEnroes with machine pistols.'' For all of Buckley's manic wit, it's these sorts of equations that don't quite work.Gene Lyons