SWEET DREAMS, IRENE

A second high-profile case for Las Piernas reporter Irene Kelly (Goodnight, Irene, 1993) begins when Jacob Henderson, a teenager whose father is running for D.A., asks her to pre-empt the story that Henderson's opponent, Monty Montgomery, will be spreading about Jacob's membership in a witches' coven. It's a lie, Jacob insists; he was photographed when he tried to get his friend Sammy Garden to leave the coven for the Casa de Esperanza, a shelter run by town grandmother Althea Fremont, next-door neighbor of Irene's lover, homicide detective Frank Harriman. Everything goes as Jacob predicts, but the real story, which doesn't begin to surface until Mrs. Fremont is murdered, makes the shelter sound a lot more dangerous than the coven. By the time Irene is kidnapped—an ordeal whose lasting psychological scars Burke limns with painful precision—the symbolic trappings of witchcraft (``not Satanism,'' if you please) are already slipping away to reveal a more sordidly commonplace crime. It's a measure of Irene's determined femininity that the climactic ordeal isn't her torture by the kidnappers, but Thanksgiving dinner with Frank's mother. Now there's a gruesome scenario.