THE LAST HOUSEWIFE

The shooting of middle-school principal Nancy Rainier-Gault brings Kit Deleeuw, the Suburban Detective (Family Stalker, 1994, etc.), out for another walk on the wild side of his New Jersey town—this time in defense of police suspect Shelly Bloomfield. Kit can't believe that Shelly, who calls herself the Last Housewife because of her impatience with career mothers and her consuming devotion to her family, would go as far as murder to keep the principal from expelling her son Jason for sexual harassment. But neither Jason nor his father seems very interested in helping Shelly; the evidence against her is damning; and Kit's inquiries at the school almost land him in jail for propositioning the monstrous, unnervingly convincing kid who threatens him with a lawsuit that'll stop him dead in his tracks. While other detectives would be out gathering information, Kit's busy trying to avoid the angry political fallout that begins in feminist rhetoric but ends, as usual with Katz, in a full-scale debate over the values of the all-too- American family. Katz may never get the hang of plotting a whodunit, but the readers whose buttons he's so alarmingly skilled in pushing will hardly notice, much less care. (Author tour)