FULL FRONTAL MURDER

Rita Galloway swears her estranged husband masterminded the botched kidnapping of their son Bobby; Hugh Galloway insists just as strenuously that he had nothing to do with it, and that Rita's a compulsive liar, cheat, and faker of evidence. As their relatives rush to take sides--Hugh's philanthropist father sniffs that he'd never wanted his son to marry that strumpet, Rite's photographer brother springs an unpleasant surprise about the Galloway family attorney--Lt. Marian Larch (Fare Play, 1995, etc.) gets the idea that maybe whoever arranged the kidnapping and is killing off the accomplices is really trying to set the two bickering Galloways against each other. So far so good; it's the canned sequel, whereby Marian's lover Curt Holland gives the book its title, that strains both suspense and belief. Despite a promising setup, below average for this long-running series.