THE HUNTING CLUB

Five New Yorkers out for a bachelor party leave their comfy bar for the Party Girl Lounge, then follow an especially game stripper up to her apartment—and into a spiraling nightmare of murder and its consequences. When John Payne, a rolling-stone helicopter traffic reporter, comes to after banging the stripper Yolanda's head against her headboard, she's dead, and his buddies—especially their unofficial leader, charismatic, high-rolling stockbroker Glen Morrow—decide that instead of facing the music, ruining naive Tom Demarest's wedding, and leaving Payne's pregnant wife Jan to have her baby alone, they'll mop up their mess, dump the body over the harbor from a copter, and count on the unlikelihood of anybody caring what became of a missing hooker. But since this is formula fiction rather than real life, they count wrong: weeks after Payne's festering guilt has turned Demarest's wedding and his own home life into one long, fevered hangover, another stripper comes after them with a blackmail threat. Morrow takes this complication under advisement, but there's still more: another witness who knows that Yolanda didn't just leave town or go on a trip, a police detective on the track of the second stripper, and the mounting hysteria shaking the male-bonding foundations of The Hunting Club. Sandom (Gospel Truths, 1992) makes the first half of this sordid tale a Big Apple Deliverance, endowing New York culture with all the corrosively dehumanizing power of Dickey's wild nature. The second half is considerably more predictable, though never less than slickly entertaining, right down to the last, inevitable twist. (Film rights to Warner Brothers—and there's no mystery why.)