CURL UP AND DIE

Everybody Stella the Stargazer knows, from an anonymous correspondent to Stella's best friend Meredith Spenser, seems to be involved with hairdresser Tony DeAngelo of Denver's Masquerade salon, so Stella makes an appointment for a cut and dye while she checks him out—and finds that DeAngelo is everything Meredith claimed, plus dead. (Somebody crossed the wires to his massage footbath as he sat soaking in coke-fortified bliss a stone's throw from Stella, semicomatose herself from the revitalizing hot towels and green goop covering every pore.) Since the murderer can't be poor Meredith (can it?), it must be somebody connected with Masquerade—maybe DeAngelo's widow. But is that Lizette, the receptionist who claims to have been quietly married to him; Gerta, the manicurist who's wearing his wedding ring; or Victoria, the co-beneficiary of his partnership insurance? Freed from the routine of her column—her editor's refused to publish it on account of the danger to her—and spurred by the danger to Meredith, Stella rouses herself to do her neatest job of detection to date, though she still has time to indulge her original specialty: finding another body. If Jorgensen's third (You Bet Your Life, 1995, etc.) doesn't exactly plumb new depths, it does give another heartfelt look at the women whose hearts beat hot against the lacy teddies under their sweatshirts as they sit around browsing through Self and pining for the embraces of unsuitable men.