DEATH BY STATION WAGON

Meet Christopher ``Kit'' Deleeuw, who's backed into tracking down vanished kids and delinquent dads when the FBI runs him off Wall Street to Rochambeau, New Jersey, for refusing to peach on his insider-trading colleagues. Kit has a social-worker wife, two kids, a dog, alertly observed suburban neighbors, and an unlikely client: a group of high-school kids who can't believe that Ken Dale, captain of the soccer team, strangled his girlfriend Carol Lombardi and then killed himself. A little snooping around among the politely hostile police, the suspicious parents of Rochambeau teens, and Carol's come- hither best friend Judy Cole persuades Kit that the killings are part of a larger pattern of violence echoing a century-old series of local murders. But what's the pattern supposed to express—or conceal? Sloppy plotting—featuring several malefactors ignorant of each other, a lot of strained deductions, and an unbelievably extended epilogue—but the suburban trimmings, from Kit's aging Volvo to his office at the American Way Mall, are a joy. Katz (Sign Off, 1991) owes his hero a mystery as good as he is.