THE WOMAN WHO LOWERED THE BOOM

Murder among the Big Apple’s literati.

The good news for successful debut novelist turned drug abuser turned ghostwriter Stewart Hoag—and it’s very good news indeed—is that Norma Fives, the editor who’d offered him a contract for his long-delayed second novel, My Sweet Season of Madness, thinks it’s the best American novel she’s read in five years, a truly great piece of work. The bad news arrives via a phone call Hoagy gets the day after he and Norma meet: Star NYPD Homicide Det. Romaine Very, Norma’s live-in lover, wants him to help identify the sender of an anonymous note threatening Norma with death. Asked to name people who might have a grudge against her, Norma sends Hoagy and Det. Very to Boyd Samuels, a literary agent whose scams she’d helped unmask, but their interview with him ends in a way that pretty much eliminates him as a suspect. So Norma comes up with three more candidates: plagiarizing presidential biographer Alexander McCord, whose latest tome was abruptly pulled from publication; agoraphobic suspense novelist Richard Groat, whom she’d cut loose when he couldn’t deliver the goods; and Penelope Estes Poole, whose highly successful Weaverton Elves cozy mysteries seem to have reached their sell-by date. When Norma’s assistant, Alissa Loeb, is stabbed to death on the Broadway local, presumably by someone who’d intended to kill Norma herself, things heat up, but it’s not long before Hoagy’s ready to confront a murderer who obligingly delivers such a remarkably detailed and extended confession that you’d swear another twist was coming. No such luck.

The mystery is nothing special, but Hoagy is always good company.