PRETTY BALLERINA

Even though Cassie Rayn’s awaited by hordes of adoring fans the moment she arrives for Chicago’s GoreFest film festival, not even the panting devotees of such earlier porn masterpieces as Pretty Ballerina—some of them, like Rhythm King Leon Minsk and Pool King Marty Devlin, wager to shell out thousands for a duly authenticated copy of the landmark video—can make her forget the adoptive brother she lost: Kim Moon, who disappeared from a church-sponsored day trip over 20 years ago, sparking an obsessive search for him that ended two years later when his father, Ellis Moon, evidently slaughtered the rest of his family and himself as Cassie cowered in the basement. Now the childhood terror has resurfaced in a blitz of sinister mailings from “Lost Moon Developers” advertising vacation trips, timeshares, and home improvements. Cassie turns to Harding, the unlicensed shamus whose unsavory connections make him the most likely person either to solve the mystery or to be on a first-name basis with whoever’s behind it. And Harding soon finds that Cassie isn’t the only one who’s been getting mail from Lost Moon Developers—or the only one whose life expectancy has been decimated by the unholy blast of child abuse, kidnaping, blackmail, prostitution, and good clean video fun that’s come roaring out of Cassie’s past. Less feverish than Harding’s striking debut (This Far, No Further, 1996)—but there’s still no shortage of strange doings, courtesy of enough criminals to keep the Chicago justice system occupied well into the next millennium.