GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER

Having dispatched a trio of strong silent types to Grantham p.i. Benny Cooperman's bedside to get his attention and deliver him to a previously unannounced meeting, Abram Wise, Canada's greatest unconvicted crook, tells Benny that somebody's been making a series of attempts on his life, and that Benny is hereby elected to head the killer off. Who wants to see Wise dead? Only his two ex-wives, waitress Paulette Staples and teacher Lilian Wise; their respective children, underachieving Hart Staples and clotheshorse Julie Wise; and half the Ontario constabulary. But Benny's attention fastens instead on a 40-year-old murder case his friend McKenzie Stewart has just written up in a true-crime book: the conviction of Mary Tatarski, the next-to-last woman to be executed in Canada after a second unseen burglar fortuitously killed her mother five years after a first break-in left her father dead—an especially timely case to be ventilating again since Ed Neustadt, the retired cop who headed the investigation that sent Mary to the gallows, has just given McStu's book a big publicity boost by getting himself murdered. Benny's return (A Victim Must Be Found, 1988, etc.) is an amiable retro puzzler marked by endless rounds of Q-and-A with the unmemorable suspects, much of it clever but none of it believable for a moment.