I'LL BE LEAVING YOU ALWAYS

Bad things happen to women who know lesbian p.i. Lauren Laurano, back now in a second outing. This time, Megan Harbaugh, her oldest friend, is robbed in her Greenwich Avenue store, and then murdered two hours later. (Forget about the robbery; it's as coincidental as the pre-murder rape in Lauren's Everything You Have Is Mine.) Hired by Ray Davies, the ex-husband who was two-timing Meg with her daughter Blythe, to find out who killed her, Lauren, unable to identify Topic A, the elusive new man in Meg's life, zeroes in instead on the Greenwich Ave. Merchants Association, which seems to have been running a subway-token scam—but her investigation will lead past another corpse in Meg's store back to Topic A after all. Sub-par detection sparked by Lauren's lively, faux-naãf narration. The sensitivity to fashionable attitudes about gay couples, AIDS, recycling, and the New York homeless will satisfy even the strictest of the P.C. police.