RAGE FACTOR

Houston skip tracer Dixie Flannigan is so good at her job that she’s bagged her quarry, accused rapist Lawrence Coombs, by page 12. But oily, well-dressed Coombs, who’s just as good at what he does, manages to talk himself out of a conviction, leaving the plot heading at top speed in three directions. Since Dixie’s lost a bet on Coombs’s conviction, she’s holding the bag as an unwilling bodyguard for the even more unwilling Sarina Page, a bratty teenager whose TV actress mother has attracted the notice of a stalker who sends vaguely threatening valentines and promises more personal attentions when the time is ripe. Sarina, who thinks she’s in no danger from the stalker, doesn’t want to be guarded and doesn’t plan to cramp her freewheeling lifestyle just to suit her babysitter. Meanwhile, legal vindication hasn’t protected Coombs from a sexual assault as brutal as the one he was accused of. Convinced that Dixie is behind his troubles, he plots the nastiest, most unimaginative revenge he can think of. No matter how furiously he tails Dixie and Sarina through the fleshpots of greater Houston, however, he’s already in danger of becoming just another footnote to the saga of the Avenging Angels, a crew of female vigilantes who mete out swift justice to men who beat the system. The identities of the Angels is Rogers’s biggest (and only) surprise, but it’s hard to care who’s technically guilty when the victims are so despicable, and so unanimously execrated by every red-blooded female in sight. Even more generously plotted than Dixie’s striking debut (Bitch Factor, 1998) but even more undisciplined as well. Still, readers who seethe at the injustices of the justice system will find some raucous comfort here.