MIRROR MAZE

Another dizzying high-wire act from Bayer (Blind Side, 1989; Wallflower, 1991; etc.). The thrills this time come from watching Lt. Frank Janek tease out the connections between a routine bar pickup that left the victim drugged, robbed, and dead, and a nine-year-old sex murder, long since closed, that reeks of NYPD coverup; the final gasp of disappointment comes from watching the talented author lose his balance. For nine years, corporate-takeover king Jake Mendoza, who liked his sex games raunchy, has been doing time for hiring boxer Gus Metaxas, since a suicide victim, to kill his wife and enthusiastic S&M partner Edith. Case closed—until Janek, returning from a wildly misfired visit to Cuba to interrogate the just-discovered Mendoza maid, is confronted with the murder of Philip Dietz, a West Coast exec who avenged his firing by walking off with an out-of-this-world computer chip that was missing from the hotel room he'd brought his attractive pickup back to. We already know about the pickup—she's a professional ``bad girl'' named Gelsey who drugs, robs, and humiliates men on the make in revenge for her father's sexual abuse in a mirror maze underneath her house on a now-deserted Newark fairground. But what does all this have to do with the legendary Mendoza case? Not much, really, despite an overdose of mirror metaphors and a spectacular mirror-maze finale cribbed (with acknowledgment) from The Lady of Shanghai. The police-corruption plot shines with rot; the hints of kinky sex are gruesome as ever; and the general atmosphere is brilliantly nasty. But despite the foundations of another powerhouse procedural, the yawning gaps and heroic coincidences finally bring the funhouse down. (First printing of 25,000)