EVICTION BY DEATH

Would chronically unemployed actress Victorian Bowering (Cancellation by Death, 1992) kill sleazy Upper West Side landlord Harvey Wood just because he threatened to veto the sublet that her lucrative touring job depended on? How about if she was ringleader of her building's Tenants Association, too, and had quarreled with Wood in public? Before you answer, consider that everyone Vic fights with- -except for her ex-husband Barry Laskin and the other equally unhelpful men in her life (one of whom ends up arresting her)—has been slated for the big sleep. Who else would have had reason to kill her upstairs neighbor—a crazy old provocateur in the Tenants Association—and maybe even an AIDS patient in a neighboring building? As before, Vic's intuition makes detection as minimal as mystery, but you can't help liking a heroine whose stylish chagrin lets her describe herself at a party as ``standing between two men who had run off with other, shorter, women.''