THE COLD TRUTH

Talk about timing. Julian Palmer, a female recruit sent forth from the New York City Police Academy to serve as the first-ever intern to Winston —Bear— Edwards, retiring police chief of Canaanville, in the upstate Snow Belt, arrives only a month after the chief’s very first unsolved homicide. The victim is a 21-year-old waitress named Sarah Langley; the means of death brutal; and the only lead from volunteer psychic Wayne Hill, a sometime mental patient of Dr. Ernest Tibor’s who tested zero for psychic ability at Duke University’s parapsychology center. After a few days at the local Ramada Inn, Julian succumbs to a pressing invitation from Edwards’s wife Estelle to stay in the room over their barn, and from that point on the only other events that occur are her furious tangles with the rest of the tiny cast over whodunit. Hill, Tibor, Edwards, Estelle, and another of Tibor’s patients named Eugene Green: those are all the possible suspects, and first-timer Stone makes each come to attention and jump through hoops with a magician’s skill and lion tamer’s nerve. The final effect suggests Hugh Pentecost’s “Challenge to the Reader” cruelly drawn out to novel length; long after you’ve given up trying to figure out where the next twist is coming from, Stone’s just getting warmed up. A chilling little gem with the ferocious logic of a Beethoven quartet. ($50,000 ad/promo)