Sati

Popular YA author Pike (the paperback Chain Letter) here tries his hand at something bigger - in fact, much bigger, since his subject now is the Second Coming. Mike Winters is just your average Joe when we meet him, driving his rig on a routine run between Phoenix and L.A., thinking about the diner around the bend, his sweet five-year-old daughter, Jenny, and wife, Linda, who's recently given him the heave-ho. Then in the desert he picks up a pretty blond hitchhiker named Sari, who seems at first every trucker's dream. But what ensues back at Mike's L. A. apartment complex is hardly a roll between the sheets. Sati announces that she's God and starts holding meetings attended by lots of Mike's friends, including kindly drug-dealer Nick, failing AIDs victim Timmy, and little Jenny, who becomes SaWs first convert. "This world, this entire creation, is my playground. I made it to play in, for you to find delight in," Sati, the new savior, tells them, then challenges a minister to hammer a nail into her hand - which the poor cleric can't ultimately bring himself to do. Sari doesn't manage to save Timmy's life, but she does make things a little happier for those who embrace her. And before being poisoned by a doubter, she leaves Mike with a cookie recipe that will make him more successful than Amos or Pepperidge Farm. Beverly Cleary meets Shirley MacLaine in this novel for the New Age - which is neatly written but much too sugar, coated and simplistic to attract anyone other than the spiritually adolescent. (Kirkus Reviews)