BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH

Segregation is alive and well at Maine's exclusive Amber Cove seaside resort. But it's segregation between the Insiders—light- skinned African-American professionals like pioneering feminist Mattie Harris, her godson Hank (an MIT history professor), and the nervously proper Tatterson family—and the Outsiders, dark-skinned upstarts like Tina Jackson, the dreadlocked beauty involved with Durant Tatterson, and Blanche White, the caustic domestic who, relocated from North Carolina to Boston, thinks she is taking a vacation from detective work (Blanche on the Lam, 1992). No such luck: Not only was bullying Insider gossip Faith Brown electrocuted in her bathtub the night before Blanche arrived, but Hank has vanished into the Atlantic, leaving behind a note admitting that he killed her. So where's the mystery? In Faith's purse, where Blanche, goaded by an intruder who unwisely thought to discourage her, finds a cache of papers whose nasty secrets make it clear that Faith was a lot more vicious than she looked—and that certain Insiders are protecting much more than their social standing. Even so, tracking down the victims of Faith's treachery makes for a pretty limp mystery that, as in Blanche's debut, takes a back seat to an acerbic portrait of class infighting at its most corrosive.