Slender Fantasies

Meet Ralph Plotkin, a Los Angeles lawyer whose career has gone into the tank. A recovering compulsive gambler who has stolen from his client's trust fund, Ralph is under investigation by the State Bar and owes money to a Korean Mafia loan shark. Reduced to crashing posh Hollywood parties to forage for food, Ralph is about to skip out to Mexico when he encounters Iris Labelle, a wannabe actress and resigned anorexic and bulimic who suggests that maybe her eating disorder stems from her childhood doll: the Bobbie Doll. Not to be confused with Barbie, this childlike androgynous doll (who sometimes wears a nose ring and tattoo) is flat chested and Twiggy thin, just like Iris. Enter Charlie Kim, a Swarthmore grad posing as the head of the Korean Mafia who wants to be the next Steven Spielberg, and his cleaver-wielding cousin Genghis. When they threaten to make kimchi out of Ralph's index fingers, Ralph promises payment from the proceeds of a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the Bobbie Doll. It seems the doll suffered from a design defect-it was unnaturally thin, which caused young women to suffer from anorexia and bulimia. "A sure winner. We're suing for millions," says Ralph. Readers who join Ralph in his efforts to promote a nuisance suit into a nationwide class action will encounter intrigue, conspiracy, agents and double-agents, and a bizarre cast of malady-ridden characters that include a militant woman's movement, a knuckle-cracking megalomaniac defense attorney, the octogenarian hypochondriac chairman of a Korean conglomerate and his shaman priestess, a forensic psychiatrist suffering from agoraphobia, and thousands of emaciated young women who started out life with the Bobbie Doll, the doll of the eighties and nineties. Slender Fantasies is a fast-paced satire of the legal profession that will keep you turning pages until the final plot-twisting denouement when Ralph, facing insurmountable odds, stands alone in a "David and Goliath" courtroom confrontation to prove that playing with dolls, at least the Bobbie Doll, really can be dangerous to a young girl's health.