Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505190003
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
By Jon Katz. Doubleday. $19.95.
"The Last Housewife" is the third in Jon Katz's Suburban Detective mystery series. The author's name will be familiar to many readers as media critic for New York magazine and contributor to other print and electronic magazines. These novels are some of the best mysteries I've seen in a long time.
The series features Kit DeLeeuw, an ex-stock broker who left Wall Street by strong invitation from federal agents and has redefined his life in northern New Jersey. Kit's a wonderful character, a great husband and father best described in Yiddish as a mensch, a really good and caring person. Along with solving upscale murders and other crimes, Kit also does housework and shares childcare with his wife. The novels are tight, well-plotted and well developed with accurate and wonderfully acerbic portraits of middleclass suburban life.
In "The Last Housewife" Kit finds himself (appropriately enough) up to his buttocks in adolescent sexual harassment, murder and a town divided over how families should be structured. It's a timely, explosive murder mystery full of events and people that will seem familiar and will keep readers totally absorbed.
- JUDY KWELLER
A Long Line of Dead Men.
By Lawrence Block. Morrow. $20.
Lawrence Block, an old hand at this game, takes a well-worn plot and twists it just enough to make it new and interesting. This time, continuing hero Matthew Scudder must find out who has been killing apparently reputable members of a secret club. It's a plot Agatha Christie and others used well. But Block transports it to the increasingly mean streets of New York and, inevitably, renews the old truth that few among us are really as we would want the world to know.
- ROBERT HILLDRUP
The Codicil.
By Tom Topor. Hyperion. $21.95.
Tom Topor wrote the script for Jodie Foster's film, "The Accused," the Broadway play "Nuts" which became a Barbra Streisand vehicle and three other novels. The "codicil" of this title refers to a supplement to a will, changing it or explaining something in it. In this case, a wealthy man has left a major portion of his estate to an unknown, unnamed child he may have had with a Vietnamese woman during the war.
His wife and three children stand to lose much if the child is found. The executors hire Adam Bruno, an attorney-detective-photographer to find the child. Topor develops the characters fully, sometimes overly, adding much to the story. Bruno travels widely in his attempt to find the child and in his travels encounters an abortionist, a wildly erratic Vietnam vet, a humanitarian pilot, a "ghost" Vietnamese officer and an Amerasian interpreter.
They are all tied together neatly but the novel is hard to categorize. It is not a murder mystery, but it is a mystery. It is not a book about lawyers or crimes or wars or women's rights or pro- or anti-choice, but it involves all of those things. On a scale of one-to-ten, give it an eight.
- JOSEPH WILLIAMS
Suspicion of Guilt.
By Barbara Parker. Dutton. $22.95.
This novel is a vacation in the tropics. Gail Connor, a civil litigation attorney, is a single mother trying to work her way into partnership in a white, male legal firm in Miami. When an old friend turns up with a multi-million dollar estate claim, she believes she may have finally found the case to make her career. What she actually finds is vice, murder and danger that makes its way into her home to threaten her young daughter and herself.
Connor's savvy sophistication, social pedigree and sexy good looks combine with a very real vulnerability to make her an appealing character with a strong supporting cast - a troubled young daughter, a mother who knows where all the old family bodies are buried, and a really hot attractive lover who tried to adjust his old-world expectations to his tumultuous relationship with Gail. Add to all that a firm full of hard-edged partners and associates and an insouciant secretary along with some flamboyant "bad guys," and you've got an excellent web of greed and conspiracy.
Barbara Parker is a former prosecutor with the state attorney's office of Dade County, Florida. This is her second Gail Connor novel.
- JUDY KWELLER
Judy Kweller is vice-president of an advertising agency.
Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.
Joseph Williams works with the legal system.
by CNB