MURDER KEEPS A SECRET

Genteel attorney Reuben Frost, whose retirement has been taken up with solving murders (Murders and Acquisitions; Murder Takes a Partner; Murder for Lunch), attends the Reuff Foundation dinner honoring his godson David Rowan, an American-history scholar now hard at work on a biography of the late Supreme Court Justice Garrett Ainslee. While there, Reuben meets Senator Edmunds, a presidential candidate; Richard Taylor, his overprotective assistant; Grace Mann, David's second wife and a TV newscaster; David's editor and publisher at Hammersmith Press, a financially troubled house; but not Alan, David's son, who was kept from attending by his vindictive mother. Next morning, David's dead--pushed out the window--and his office is ransacked. Whodunit? Reuben and N.Y.P.D. cop Bautista again team up and are again upstaged by their wives, who lend a hand when the boys bog down. As ever in Frost novels, the murderer is brought to justice via a most unlikely clue--here, the word ""Elizabeth"" whispered by David's researcher Horace, an AIDS sufferer, who is later smothered in his hospital bed. Civilized, polite, and discreetly barbed when the subject is publishing economics, academic bickering, or grant-bestowers' egos; not quite so polished when it comes to sound plotting or fair clues.