Bookends

MASTERPIECE

by Thomas Hoving

Simon & Schuster; 320 pages; $17.95

It's a connoisseur-eat-connoisseur world out there: lies, low blows, sexual politics, thievery, bribery, betrayal and greed. In his first foray into popular fiction, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor in chief of Connoisseur magazine, takes us into the international art arena, where a masterpiece has come up for auction. On the block is the Marchesa Odescalchi, a sexy full-length portrait by the 17th century Spanish master Diego Velasquez of his alleged mistress. Experts predict that the portrait will bring at least $11 million, an auction record for a single painting. Among the main competitors in the battle for the naked marchesa are two archrival museums, Washington's National Gallery and New York City's Metropolitan. The National is represented by its director, Andrew Foster -- young, rich, dashing and secretly a CIA agent. The Met's champion is Olivia Cartwright, whose mentor is the omniscient and fabulously wealthy Neapolitan dwarf Count Nerone (a good Velasquezian touch, since the artist painted a fair number of valuable dwarfs). Rivalry soon leads to attraction, which soon turns into love. Before the hammer finally comes down, love has led to Soviet intrigue, data bases, haute cuisine and unintentionally hilarious dialogue. Says the smitten Olivia to Andrew: "I want you, I want you . . . but I have to go. To see the Velasquez in the Kunsthistorisches Museum."

APPLE'S EUROPE

by R.W. Apple Jr.

Atheneum; 264 pages; $14.95

Pack a universal drain stopper for Samarkand and a pepper mill on any trip. If you fancy a great British breakfast in London, bypass Claridge's and make for Fred's, a transport cafe in the East End docks. If you want to find the "timeless serenity" of the Tuscan master, Piero della Francesca -- well, there are a number of things you should do, and they are all set out with a welcome absence of guidebook rhetoric or literary flourish in this insistently readable book. The author, who was London bureau chief of the New York Times from 1977 to 1985, must never have spent a weekend at home. Besides a journalist's curiosity and a practiced eye for the pleasures of life, he has a knack for making destinations sound both seductive and easily negotiable. And the best part of it is that he is usually right. His long section on Britain is dead-on, and written with infectious gusto. His list of the best small restaurants in Venice would take even frequent visitors years of trial and error to draw up.

MAYFLOWER MADAM

by Sydney Biddle Barrows

with William Novak

Arbor House; 291 pages; $17.95

Lonely members of the credit-card set thought it was the best little escort service in Manhattan. The police had other ideas. They arrested its owner, Sydney Biddle Barrows, for promoting prostitution. Found guilty and fined $5,000, she is now promoting a book. Mayflower Madam, so-called because Barrows is directly descended from Plymouth's original white settlers, has a first printing of 100,000 copies. Barrows makes plain that she was active only at the management end of the enterprise. In fact, her book reads much like a small-business manual: "My second marketing decision had to do with a new category of escorts. We'd had two or three price hikes over the years, and by 1984 we were charging $175 an hour." This approach is no surprise; her co- author, William Novak, ghosted Iacocca. The book's best hustle is its puritan tone, as if this descendant of the nation's most famous boat people was only in search of excellence.

A GIRL OF FORTY

by Herbert Gold

Fine; 254 pages; $16.95

Author Herbert Gold's 16th novel deftly mixes satire and sermons. Frank Curtis, 43, teaches journalism at Berkeley and falls into an affair with Suki Read, an ex-flower child who has managed not to change with the times, which include the approach of her 40th birthday. Curtis gets to attend Suki's parties, where guests say things like "Her garden, her greens! She really really ecologizes, doesn't she?" Gold has good fun with such dialogue and the mayfly mentality of Northern California trendies. But Suki's teenage son Peter eventually puts a damper on the humor. Witnessing the parade of his mother's lovers has apparently unhinged the young man, and he chooses to take bizarre vengeance on Curtis. "That kid is centerfold material in Horror magazine," a police detective warns the intended victim, and what happens next bears out this assessment. Gold's bittersweet fable of pleasures and their price is hard to put down and forget.