TWISTER

Pet-store owner Robin Light (Chutes and Adders, 1994) has always been jealous of her ``rich beauty queen'' friend Lynn Stanley, but no morenot since she followed Lynn to an abandoned house and found her friend hunched over the dead body of a stranger. And less and less is Lynn enviable, as she confesses to the murder, and her brother Ken tells Robin that she already killed somebody else as a child. Since the current victim, Brandon Douglas, has been nosing around Syracuse, looking for whoever killed his own sister, Janet Tyler, ten years agoeven though Janet's cousin Matt Lipsyle confessed to that murder and has been doing time ever sincethe atmosphere is heavy, not with unsolved crimes, but with too-solved crimes. As if Robin didn't have her hands full enough tangling with confessed killers and the unfriendly local police, she has to deal back at the pet shop with a puppy she rescued from another sneering suspect and a missing tarantula whose favorite dinner is tropical birds. Surprisingly, the pert Robin, in her second case, keeps her head even while she's rushing from one overgalvanized scene to the nextall en route to a thoroughly logical denouement featuring the one suspect who's never confessed to a thing.