MY GAL SUNDAY

Like Dorothy Sayers's memorably subtitled Busman's Honeymoon, Clark's new cycle of four longish tales is best described as ``A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.'' Certainly her newlywed detective team comes with the most impeccable credentials. Sandra (a.k.a. Sunday) O'Brien Britland, 32, is a beautiful congresswoman from New Jersey; her bridegroom, Henry Parker Britland IV, is the handsome former US President who must have been elected hours after he was old enough to run for the office. Between their Gothic Revival country home in suburban New Jersey and their vacation home in the Bahamas, Henry and Sunday, who apparently aren't affiliated with any political party or platform, might seem to lead a charmed life, but there are perils. In ``A Crime of Passion,'' they set out to clear Henry's former secretary of state of a murder charge, and Sunday ends up looking down the barrel of the killer's gun. Then Sunday is kidnapped herself in ``They All Ran After the President's Wife,'' apparently in exchange for a murderous terrorist who'll stop at nothing—custom-made suits, champagne, caviar, an SST escape—in his demands. ``Hail, Columbia!'' asks what really happened to a Latin American prime minister who disappeared from the Britland family yacht 32 years before Henry buys it back for Sunday. And ``Merry Christmas/Joyeux Noâl'' brings back that old Clark standby, the kidnapped child, in a pale seasonal echo of Silent Night (1995). The real interest here, as in Clark's Alvirah and Willy stories (The Lottery Winner, 1994), is in the romance of wealth, coupled this time with the potent fairy-tale mix of power, glamour, gentility, and a certain endearing obtuseness (``Neither my husband nor I believe in ostentation or in conspicuous consumption,'' Sunday tells her kidnapper). Clark's army of fans won't find any unseemly surprises here- -and will know better than to expect much in the way of mystery or suspense in this gentle, upscale epithalamion. (First printing of 800,000; Literary Guild main selection)