TORCH

Ten minutes after she gives limping p.i. Fred Carver (Thicker Than Blood, 1993, etc.) $1,000 to follow her to an assignation with her lover, Enrico Thomas, Donna Winship steps in front of a truck and dies. Why did divorce-hunting Donna, a friend of Carver's black reporter girlfriend Beth, hire Carver to follow her and not her cheating husband Mark? Before Carver can approach Mark to get that question answered, the grieving husband is shot to death, another apparent suicide. As Carver, obsessed with giving Donna value for her money, traces the connections between Mark's mistress, Maggie Rourke, and ex-burglar Carl Gretch (aka Enrico Thomas, shortly dead as well)- -they both worked as models for an agency that had links to an unsavory escort service called Nightlinks—he gradually realizes that Donna, like himself, has been carrying a torch as well, in an unusual, inventive, highly contemporary variant of the old badger game. From the unobtrusive gradations in central Florida bars to the skillful modulations of threat and counterthreat in the most commonplace conversations, Lutz shows once again why he's the current dean of American private-eye writers.