CADAVER

Wealthy, attractive nurse Edwina Crusoe (Rigor Mortis, 1991, etc.), newly married to detective Martin McIntyre of New Haven's Homicide division, is now a p.i. specializing in medical cases. She's asked for help by flaky Mona Weissman, whose doctor father shot himself to death in his locked car, engine running. Mona doesn't believe it's suicide; neither does Weissman's secretary, Marcia Larsen, with whom he'd had a long-running, extramarital affair. Meanwhile, the police are preoccupied with the escape of psychotic killer Craig Fellowes from his hospital bed shackles in Chelsea Memorial Hospital, where other bizarre things are happening—the killing of Marcia Larsen in her late boss's ransacked office and the disappearance of a genius researcher who needs the bodyguard provided by his millionaire father. The kidnapping of McIntyre inspires Edwina's sometimes erratic sleuthing instincts to pull all the elements together in a tense windup. Overloaded with plot contrivances but gripping—and the best yet of this series.