FATAL CUT

Denise Parks was a thoroughly unlikable woman—a daughter so jealous of her late mother’s memory that she insisted on keeping everything in the house she shared with her sister Janine exactly as Maggie Parks had kept it, a sister so spiteful that she—d stoop to anything to drive off Mike Sanderson, the divorced car-salesman she didn—t find suitable for Jan—but nothing she did merited the painful, ignominious death she suffered when someone filled her mouth with hair mousse as she sweated helpless in her beauty salon’s Turkish bath. Now it’s Chief Inspector Connor O—Neill and Sgt. Fran Wilson, of the Fowchester police, who are sweating as they try to pluck the killer from among Le Salon’s personnel. Since owner Dale Dunbar doesn—t ask questions about his staff’s private lives, there are plenty of secrets for O—Neill and Wilson to dig up. The receptionist, the chief haircutter, his understudy, the beautician—all are hiding something. So are Jan herself, her mother’s house, and—well, you get the idea. Sadly, most of these secrets are drearily commonplace; worse, too many of them remain red herrings with only a tangential relation to Denise’s murder, and to the murder that follows. Green extends her range by an obligatory sequence at a leather bar and a spot of decorous romance between her coppers, but fans of her Kate Kinsella mysteries (Deadly Partners, 1997, etc.) won—t find much here to stretch their imaginations.