A SMALL TARGET

A third course for poet/professor/trail-chef Lee Squires (Grizzly, 1994, etc.), whose job back east just can't keep her out of the Montana Rockies, even though the results are uniformly fatal. This time she's cooking for the llama trek her friend Pete Bonsecours is running in conjunction with his ``Low-Impact Tourism'' workshop. That's right, llamas—because their soft paws tear up trails less than horses' hooves. The serious environmental impact, though, comes from the bullets that kill L.A. developer Charlie Herron—shot by tribal spy Roland Redhawk, who's been sent on the outing to see just what kind of casino resort this guy plans for Lost Pipe Lake—and the arrows that kill Roland himself. Although Roland's killing is witnessed by Lee, Pete, flaky tourist Felicity Parsley, retired mechanic Eddie McNab, and filmmakers Gwen Mears and Mary Ann Dellarobbia (who even capture it on video), the killer, an unknown young woman, doesn't stick around to watch the tape, and Lee ends up making a second hike up-country with her love-object, Montana state investigator Luke Donner, to track the killer, talk her down, and dig up the inevitable motive. Since there are eyewitnesses to both murders, there aren't many surprises in store. But Andreae stocks her trailbags with interesting people, even if most of them drop out of the story too soon.