A HUNTING WE WILL GO

Los Angeles newswoman rises above a mercenary station manager and the incompetence of the LAPD to nab a sadistic killer with a taste for beautiful female celebrities. Arthur Combs, at the urging of ``Bo,'' whose disembodied voice somehow whispers instructions, gets naked, rubs down with undiluted civet, stalks pretty women and sexually savages them. When Katlyn Rome makes an on-the-air speech about the case, she angers Chief of Detectives Stryker and, of course, Arthur and the mysterious Bo. It's no surprise, then, that she becomes their next target, which tickles her venal boss, upsets her struggling musician husband Matthew, and diverts the spotlight from the ambitious Stryker. Detective Dan Jarrett—department bad-boy—gets the assignment when Kate, after a staged broadcast aimed at drawing out the killer, has to go into hiding. Matthew goes missing, their in vitro embryo gets stolen from the hospital lab, and Arthur sets fire to the woods around Kate's not-so-safe safe house—forcing her out and into his clutches. But Jarrett catches Arthur just as he's about to do awful things to Kate, after which Jarrett and Kate start making eyes at each other (a sure sign that poor Matthew is done for). After a woman is arrested for the hospital lab break-in and the vile Arthur commits suicide, Stryker calls the case solved. Kate and Jarrett disagree, as does Matthew, who's now being held captive by Bo—in the cottage right next door. When Kate realizes where Matthew is, she eludes her two police guards, grabs her pistol, and rushes to the rescue. Jarrett follows bravely, sans backup (``the situation was too delicate for. . . even the well-trained SWAT teams''). Advertising executive Friedman (a paperback, The Crib, 1979) lacks any trace of flair for the melodramatic. The result is a novel peopled with stock characters and rife with plot devices that are often both unbelievable and illogical at once.