A Hamptons Christmas

Beecher Stowe couldn't be more pleased than to find himself spending that delicious season between Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Hamptons. On his first weekend back, East Hampton stages its annual ragtag, irresistibly corny, small-townish Santa Claus parade, complete with a high school band and Santa on a flatbed truck. It's an old-fashioned American village Christmas (even if the elves include Spielberg's kids!). Stowe has even convinced his lady friend Alix Dunraven to join him and see the Hamptons without the summer people.

But Beecher and Her Ladyship's plans for an "out of season" frolic are complicated by the puzzling arrival of a small girl who may be named "Susannah" (she uses pseudonyms, she admits), skinny, precocious, and armed with a platinum card. The kid, who turns out to be the child of Dick and Nicole, a wealthy power couple whose bitter divorce has become the stuff of Page Six gossip and legal wrangling before the World Court at The Hague, has been farmed out by her parents to a Swiss convent.

Now, as Christmas nears, Susannah descends on East Hampton intent on spending the holidays with her role model, Martha Stewart, from whom she expects a warm welcome when she presents herself at her front door. The problem? Martha does Christmas at her other home in Westport, Connecticut. As the snow begins to fall, Beecher encounters a forlorn young Susannah sipping Shirley Temples at The Blue Parrot bar.

Can Alix and Beecher possibly salvage Christmas for this little girl lost?