"Charmian was one of the most sought-after women in Hollywood; I knew because her publicity said so." This is how an 11-year-old sophisticate describes her mother in Diane Leslie's Fleur de Leigh's Life Of Crime, a lighthearted and cheerfully barbed look at growing up among the well-heeled in 1950s Beverly Hills. The child's name alone, Fleur de Leigh, goes a long way in revealing both Charmian's incredible vanity and her high-minded efforts to slip French into casual conversation. Far from "sought-after," she's the gracefully aging star of disreputable B-pictures with such titles as Chipewyan Chanteuse and Ivan The Marriageable. Her equally snobby and inattentive husband produces a game show in which formally dressed contestants are slowly submerged into a water tank when they answer questions incorrectly. Without much guidance, save for a succession of emotionally unstable nannies, Fleur navigates this distorted world of adult sexuality and self-indulgence with a winning sense of humor and surprising resourcefulness. Born and bred in Hollywood, Leslie knows the territory, and her hyper-realistic novel constantly surprises with its delightful and increasingly bizarre detours into high society. She divides the chapters by the names of characters that enter and leave Fleur's life in short order, with each episode successful on its own terms while contributing to her evolving perspective. Fleur de Leigh's Life Of Crime is loaded with memorable setpieces, including a Christmas party with an ill-advised ancient Egyptian theme and an experimental "psychodrama" therapy session where spoiled rich kids stage reenactments of their traumatic family squabbles. Ostensibly a coming-of-age story, Leslie's accomplished debut tweaks its conventions enough to arrive at something more interesting, a tale in which an "adult in miniature" winds up better adjusted than the real adults around her.