CAST IN STONE

Years and years ago, stunning Marge Sundstrom broke up the gaggle of hangers-on and friends her new husband Heck, commercial fisherman of the Lady Day, had gathered around him. Now it's Marge who needs the solace of friends, with her son Nicky killed in a boating accident, and his grief-stricken father hospitalized after getting hit by a car he didn't bother to avoid. The records list a third casualty—Nicky's bride, Allison Stark, who steamrolled Nicky the same way Marge had steamrolled Heck—but Marge doesn't believe for a minute that Allison's dead, and she wants Leo Waterman, one of the original Lady Day alumni, to hunt her down. And hunt he does, in an odyssey that takes him from his old haunts at Seattle's fisherman's wharf—where he picks up the trail of still another untidy disappearance—to the wilds of Wisconsin, from a bilked realtor to a football player-turned- televangelist, each with a shivery tale to tell about the chameleon last seen in the guise of Allison Stark Sundstrom. Together with his aging Irregulars, who like detecting more than anything but drinking, Leo follows each twist and bump in this fatal femme's life story till the predictable, but highly effective, finale. A stronger villain and tighter plotting lifts this search- and-destroyer over Leo's debut, Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? (1995).