A GRAND NIGHT FOR MURDER

Journeyman Jeffers (Murder On Mike, 1984, etc.) returns to the mystery fold with this waggishly entertaining salute to the Mystery Writers of America. It's obvious that whoever killed Jonathan Dodge, the newly-crowned MWA Grand Master, is somebody he insulted at the annual dinner earlier that evening. But that doesn't narrow the field very much, since in the hours before he became a neatly tuxedoed corpse in Morgan Griffith's suburban boathouse, the owlish, histrionic Jonathan found time to offend nearly everyone at Morgan's table. Joining forces with Harvey Goldstein, the top cop who believes that reading detective fiction helps solve crimes, and Goldstein's pistol-packing sidekick Sgt. John Bogdanovic, D.A.'s investigator Arlene Flynn wades through a thicket of allusions from Sherlock Holmes to John le CarrÇ before rounding upwhat else?a fatal book by a second murdered writer, a roman exposing the killer's feet of clef. None of this carries any more weight than a round of Trivial Pursuit, of course, but readers approaching in the proper spirit of irreverence will find the proceedings lightsome and the solution appropriately tidy.