THE LADY IN THE SILVER CLOUD

Headline news: Movie star Merilee Nash wants her ex, sometime novelist Stewart Hoag, back! There are a couple of murders, too.

Halloween 1993 finds Merilee still off shooting The Sun Also Rises and Hoagy holed up in the Central Park West apartment she’s graciously loaned him, writing away furiously. Gary Kates, one of Merilee’s neighbors on the 16th floor, is a corporate raider who’s brought misery to hardworking families across America by buying companies and brutally downsizing their workforces. He’s such a natural candidate for murder that it’s a double shock when Muriel Cantrell, an aging widow who’s nice as peach cobbler, is found with a broken neck on the 15th floor landing of the service stairs. Nobody from first-shift doorman Frank O’Brien to Bullets Durmond, the mobbed-up ex-bouncer who’s driven Muriel around for years in her 1955 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, has an unkind word to say about her. But that’s before detective Lt. Romaine Very and Hoagy, who ruefully and repeatedly describes himself as “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s,” begin digging into her past. Hoagy, euphoric to find Merilee not only suddenly returned from the shoot after her director’s been fired over creative differences, but openly eager to get back together, is especially motivated to help Very uncover the skeletons in the closets of Muriel, her old friend Myrna Waldman in Glen Cove, and pretty much everyone else who’s ever passed through her gloriously upscale building. There are so many suspects, in fact, that the big reveal is more like a little squib.

Adultery, blackmail, trick-or-treaters, unseemly ties to organized crime, and New York in the 1990s. What’s not to like?