CANCELLATION BY DEATH

An ingeniously updated Had-I-But-Known introducing Victoria Bowering, a sporadically employed actress who describes her own detective gifts as a modest intuitive bent and boundless curiosity. Shortly after Vic lets into her soon-to-be-ex Barry talk her into attending a party that he and his accountant sweetie Elaine are throwing for his soap-opera client Kendall James, the only bankable asset of Raging Passions, Ken gets poisoned, and Vic finds herself picking up strong vibrations from his house keys. (Key poison?) Juggling her own two romances with a cop and a TV newsman, Vic eventually stumbles past more corpses to an unguessable (i.e., underclued) solution. Yeager's smart heroine makes a dumb detective, but, still, this first novel is pleasantly breezy throughout.