MURDER LIVE AT FIVE

Up Yours reporter Albie Marx, the hippie who never grew up (Nice Guys Finish Dead, 1992; The Big O, 1994), is just chasing a story about Beverly Hills guru Ozzie Baba (``It's Not My Job To Make You Happy'') at a wedding the guru's presiding over—the nuptials of game-show king Bert Holman and his dewy bride Sheila Petersen—when two rapid developments send his day down the tubes. First, he sees a gunman jump out of a tree and blow Holman's head off minutes after his New Age vows; then the killer hands him the murder weapon and tells everybody—eventually including the uncountable TV audience of Real Life—that Albie was in on the killing with him. Caught between the war-dancing LAPD, the firestorm of public opinion, and a series of vivid threats from longtime Holman rival Mitchell Gluck, who's convinced Albie's trying to stop his takeover of a Holman target, Albie's left without a friend—unless you count Real Life host Samantha Shelton, who alternately takes him to bed and grills him on her show until both the show and Albie are hot enough to glow in the dark. Debin follows the stylish and outrageous The Big O with a bumptious tale that runs in a more predictable, preachy, anti- violent-entertainment groove. Doesn't the guy realize that in writing this book he's sleeping with the enemy.