KILLER LOOK

Who does Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper find “the most heartless group of people I’d encountered in ages”? Yes, it’s the remaining luminaries of the city’s no-longer-thriving fashion industry, whose number has been further reduced by one.

Alex, who normally heads the Sex Crimes division of the DA’s office, is under strict orders to stay home and recuperate from her recent kidnapping ordeal (Devil’s Bridge, 2015, etc.). But when Lily Savitsky, her old high school swimming teammate, informs her that the suicide of billionaire couturier Wolf Savage, who died with his head stuck in a plastic bag full of helium, was no such thing, Alex is swiftly drawn into the case. After all, Lily, the daughter Wolf abandoned when he was still Velvel Savitsky, ought to know what she’s talking about. And it’s entirely possible that the reason Wolf’s brother, Hal, CFO of his octopus business enterprise, and Wolf’s son, Reed, who runs the firm’s international operations, are so eager to grab the body from the mortuary has less to do with religious principles than with concealing any telltale evidence of murder. The whole Savage/Savitsky family, in fact, howls like wolves every time Alex approaches them, and her boss, Manhattan DA Paul Battaglia, is no more happy that she’s taken it upon herself to work a case he’s assigned to one of her colleagues. But without Alex, who would keep count of all the real-life celebrities from the fashion establishment hovering on the edges of the case or serve as a sounding board for soup-to-nuts explanations of this cutthroat—sorry, this smothering—industry?

Workmanlike detection, beautiful people caught in unlovely doings, and more information than you probably needed about the heroine’s endless personal traumas. Average for this long-running series.