NO HIDING PLACE

Back in her low-rent Newark office after her foolish, melodramatic trip to Jamaica (Where Evil Sleeps, 1996), Tamara Hayle is looking for the killer of Shawn Raymond—a case the cops have had open for seven months on the grounds that Shawn was no great loss. And every indication is that the cops were right, since Gus Lennox, the retired cop whose daughter Gina was the mother of Shawn's second and last child, is positively gleeful that his whole family—his wife and two brothers, Gina's twin Lena—has alibis for the shooting of this ne'er-do-well interloper. Only the discovery of Gina's body wipes the smiles off the Lennox family's faces, and confirms Tamara's unerring instinct for the wrong man. Behind the plodding Q-and-A and the pedestrian prose is a sharp, subtle portrait of two families whose tangled relationship packs a world of insight into a single painful case. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild alternate selection; author tour)