DEATH AND THE DOGWALKER

When interior designer, amateur detective Jason Lynx (A Little Neighborhood Murder) is walking his kuvasz in the park, he spies chatty Fred Foret meditating on a bench--except that Fred, it turns out, has been propped into position: he's dead, in a murder strangely reminiscent of Melody Steinwale's a while back. With his cop-girlfriend Grace away dealing with her druggie brother, and his gay assistant, Mark, despondent over losing his lover, Jason solves these murders more or less on his own, piecing together Fred's tawdry past--which included an abused ex-wife and daughter, as well as another unacknowledged daughter. Meanwhile, Melody's egocentric artist-husband falls under suspicion, but is eventually cleared when the plot takes a Murder on the Orient Express twist. Carefully planted clues figure heavily in the denouement, and puzzle-lovers will find them fair and reasonable. Jason, however, is not quite so interesting now that he's no longer haunted by memories of his dead wife, and the tentative subplot (should the early-orphaned Jason answer those anonymous letters offering to reveal his father to him for a sum?) seems forced. Never before, however, has Denver sounded more like a civilized suburb of London.