A TICKET TO DIE FOR

Quite a change of pace from Walker’s searching Malachy Foley mysteries (Applaud the Hollow Ghost, p. 25, etc.): a husband-and-wife crime-fighting team that splits everything, even their name. She’s Kirsten, a cop-turned-p.i. who’s heading Chicago’s Wild Onion, Ltd.; he’s Dugan, a lawyer who got shanghaied first into his late father’s firm and now into his wife’s detective agency. They think they’re just after a deposition from a witness who overheard a conversation between their ambulance-chasing client, Larry Candle, and Rita Ranchero, whose personal-injury settlement Larry allegedly looted. But when the witness, a clerk in an adult bookstore, turns up dead, and Rita Ranchero disappears, they seem to have been dropped into a case of anti-porn agitators whose anonymous notes charge that pornography is terrorism but whose own tactics have taken a few plays from the terrorist manual too. Kirsten and Dugan know they can expect trouble from the zealots of WARP (Women Against Rape and Pornography) and the mob types whose footprints are all over the case, but they have no idea how much trouble their lying (and none too bright) client will turn out to be. As richly plotted as Mal Foley’s three other cases, but good for a lot more laughs—and a perfect introduction to the talented author.