NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

Corinth Feldman has vanished, not only from the planet Venus, where—according to her brother, Martin Riley—she reigns as Princess Ariel, but from her 50th high-school reunion. So Riley (a.k.a. Zantec, High Priest of Zartov), asks his unwilling next-door neighbor, John Tracer, to look for her and backs up the job with a roll of bills whose size is nearly as crazy as he is. Leaving Monterey Bay for Cordell, Oregon, the site of the reunion, Tracer turns up plenty of people who remember Corinth and her Uncle Hector and Aunt Leticia, even though Leticia drowned in a feeding trough during a plague of UFO sightings back in the summer of 1947. Going with Corinth's unrequited love Lucas Porfumo in search of Hector, Tracer finds that he's been dead considerably less time than Leticia—between one and three weeks, as the coroner estimates after Tracer phones the sheriff's office. Though the skeletons Tracer finds in the Riley closet seem to lead to a dead end, a parole-violation case he takes up back home in Monterey gives him a second wind—and several of his suspects their last breath. The first, Oregonian, half of Tracer's second case (Tracer, Inc., 1994) is unspectacular but workmanlike. It's not until Tracer gets back home that Andrus seems to remember he's writing about a TV-cute family of detectives and litters the story with lesser Tracers thick as landfill.