COLD SHOULDER

An alcoholic Pasadena Homicide cop comes back from six years in the gutter to take on a serial killer who preys on prostitutes. When Lt. Lorraine Page fell from grace, she fell hard. Drunk and grieving for her dead partner, she emptied her gun into a fleeing teenager, killing him, her career, her marriage, and her self-respect. Now, after six years on the streets hooking for her next bottle, her part-time work for seedy gallery-owner Art Matthews brings her up against the hammer-wielding man who's killed Holly, a working-girl friend of one of Art's transsexual helpers. Lorraine's old sidekick, Bill Rooney, soon links Holly's death to a streak of hammer murders of prostitutes extending back five years. But how does the similar killing of inoffensive Norman Hastings fit into the pattern? Rooney is convinced his case hinges on a missing witness, a prostitute solicited by the killer as he was driving around with Hastings's body in his trunk. But Rooney doesn't know his witness is Lorraine, who still carries the scars reminding her how narrowly she escaped becoming the killer's next victim—and who remembers the telltale scars she inflicted on him as well. Joining forces with Rosie Hurst, the rehab cook who took her in when she hit bottom—and taking time out from the ambivalent embraces of magnetic Brad Thorburn- -Lorraine launches her own investigation, following the evidence to the moneyed Thorburn family and the all-too-predictable skeletons stacked in its closet. Even after the killer is run to earth, there'll be much, much more, as the anything-can-happen charms of the early chapters peter out in an epilogue that implicates everybody but O.J. Simpson. Prime Suspect screenwriter La Plante (Entwined, 1993, etc.), who begins by plotting with earnest intensity, eventually pumps Lorraine's saga so full of tormented uplift that it keels over like a Thanksgiving parade balloon in a gale of sincerity. (Film rights to Michelle Pfeiffer/Twentieth Century Fox; author tour)