MY SWEET UNTRACEABLE YOU

Lesbian PI Lauren Laurano's making only her third appearance, and already they're making a movie of her second case (chronicled in Scoppettone's I'll Be Leaving You Always, 1993) outside her Greenwich Village apartment. She can't even get in and out of her front door without getting hassled, but the shoot does have its compensations: She gets to meet Cybill Shepherd, who's playing her (and who strolls through this story in a fawning cameo), and she doesn't have far to look when one Boston Blackie hires her to find his mother, Susie Mcmann, supposedly killed in an upstate car crash in 1954. A quick trip to Stone Ridge reveals that it wasn't Susie in the death car after all; but Lauren, returning to New York to question Susie's wealthy (and unacknowledged) father, Nicholas Parrish, is amazed to find that bit player Shelley McCabe, strangled in Shepherd's trailer, was Susie's twin, and that actress Samantha Wilson, found in a dumpster even before Blackie walked into Lauren's office, is her triplet. Competent mystery-mongering keeps Scoppettone's wide-eyed view of the Big Apple as a pansexual global village—Frank Capra for the '90s—largely, and appropriately, off to the side in her most satisfying case yet.