SLEEPING WITH THE CRAWFISH

Still shaken after her kidnapping in Louisiana Fever (1996), psychological profiler Kit Franklyn has banished herself to a menial job at a photography gallery when she gets a hurry call from her old boss, Chief Medical Examiner Andy Broussard. Can Kit run up to Angola State Prison and satisfy herself and Andy as to whether the man whose fingerprints seem to place him at a recent homicide really was at the time (as the Angola warden claims) still enjoying the state's hospitality? The routine (albeit sinister) errand spins wildly out of control. As soon as the warden tells her that Ronald Cicero has just died and, oops, been cremated to boot, you know how the rest of Kit's day will go; it doesn't hit bottom till long after she leaves a funeral home in nearby Courville run by the warden's brother. Back in New Orleans, the governor taps Kit to avenge that nightmarish day by going undercover as a lab tech at Agrilabs, which his office has tied to that Courville mortuary, while Andy's off to Memphis to investigate the fatal heart attack of a physiologist who's also somehow involved. Donaldson's expert crosscutting between Andy and Kit makes all this intrigue sound much less complicated than it does in summary, even though the final surprise (reaching as it does to implicate the only suspects who haven't all along been marked as guilty) goes over the top. Patricia Cornwell Lite, with all the streamlined thrills and gripping forensic detail Donaldson's fans have come to expect.