PAS DE DEATH

Self-deprecating Kansas City radiologist Dr. Townsend Reeves (Final Dictation, 1989) gets more than he bargained for when he sneaks with his sometime wife, dancer Leslie Rosenthal, into a closed rehearsal of the rival Moreau Company's new dance (setting in motion a chain of events that won't end until both raging ego Gerard Moreau and his sexually omnivorous partner, Felicia Bradley, are dead) and when he agrees to cover his friend Dr. Howard Gorell's absence from his fertility clinic the next day (not realizing quite what a pivotal role he'll be playing in his first artificial insemination). How closely are Townsend's various pratfalls connected? Ah, well, don't press such awkward questions if you want to enjoy Vincent's light touch with a quip, his hero's sharp eye for clues—ranging from the absence of hospital corners on the bed of death to the unpinched neck of a telltale moth—and the season's most original reason for not telling the police what you know about an unusually clever murder.