IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER

Ah, summer term at Philly Prep. Fascinating new colleagues like meddlesome math teacher Lowell Diggs, angry racist Aldis Fellows, and hunky Bartholomew Dennison V and his bevy of female admirers. Highly motivated students like sullen Woody Marshall and future tow-truck operator Toy Drebbin. With the love of her life, Philly cop C.K. Mackenzie, nursing a broken leg, it's no wonder that Amanda Pepper is willing to donate long hours to tutoring her most promising student, shy Vietnamese ÇmigrÇ April Truong. So she's devastated when April is apparently kidnapped from a city street and the girl's job and romance turn out to be based on lies. In between puzzling over desultory writing assignments on Romeo and Juliet, Amanda links April's disappearance to a nasty wave of white supremacismthreatening phone calls and letters, graffiti and vandalismcreeping over the city, whose summertime longueurs Roberts all-too-faithfully evokes. Tart-tongued, warm-hearted Amanda's fifth case (How I Spent My Summer Vacation, etc.) is as engaging as her others, and here she gets to do more detection than usual. Go back a grade, though, if you don't identify the rotten apple long before she does.