McNALLY'S DILEMMA

You'd have to be a sharper-eyed sleuth than foppish Archy McNally to find Vincent Lardo's name in tiny print on the copyright page, but Lardo, not the late Sanders, is the author of Archy's eighth adventure (McNally's Trial, 1995, etc.). So how does the newcomer, duly sanctified by the Sanders estate, measure up to his erratic master? Fans of the series will be relieved to know that Archy, whose ejection years ago from Yale Law restricted him to an investigative role in McNally and Son, Discreet Inquiries, is as well-turned-out, as quaintly good-natured, and as impenetrably innocent as ever as he goes about the task of shielding moneyed Melva Manning Williams and her eligible daughter Veronica from unwelcome publicity (while enlisting his pal Lolly Spindrift, Palm Beach's premier gossip columnist, to generate plenty of the favorable kind) after Melva admits that she shot her gold-digging husband Geoffrey Williams when she caught him in flagrante with a fleeing lovely who Lolly and Co. promptly dub the Mystery Woman. Most readers will be well ahead of Archy in seeing around the curves in this case, but Lardo does provide a few agreeable surprises courtesy of a subsidiary plot, John Fairhurst III's blackmail by a scoundrel who's threatening to tell the world that John I didn't go down with the Titanic but escaped in a dress. Despite his trademark industrial-strength blather, in fact, Archy ends up acting suspiciously intelligent as a detective. If Lardo doesn't win any new friends for the franchise, he won't disappoint old hands either.