YOU BET YOUR LIFE

Desperate for a vacation from the lovelorn readers who entreat her for advice, and from their irate former mates who write her threatening letters, Stella the Stargazer, of the Denver Daily Orion, repairs with her bridge circle to the picturesque gambling resort of Silverado. Naturally, trouble follows. As Stella is hitting a slot machine for a jackpot, she's chatted up by Yvonne Talmadge, the letter writer whom she'll soon recognize again as a clairvoyant vision of Yvonne horribly dead manifests itself before her eyes. Stella had advised Yvonne to seek closure in her mother's long-ago murder, and closure she's found. Even before Stella stumbles across a second body--Edie Lorton, a meddlesome former colleague from her pre-stargazing days as an accountant--she realizes that the killer is probably one of the friends she's come with. But Stella's psychic visions, so reliable at predicting mysterious deaths, are much less helpful at solving them. Here, she has to rely on a nonstop diet of break-ins, floods, and thrills and spills inside the darkness of the Last Chance Mine to keep up the interest of this slapdash tale. Eventful stuff, with an edge of comic hysteria. But as in A Love to Die For (1994), Stella's main qualification as a detective--as the exasperated sheriff complains--is her proclivity for finding corpses.