SOMEBODY ELSE’S MUSIC

Although now a famous author of penetrating nonfiction books and a frequent guest on CNN, Nightline, and PBS news shows, Elizabeth Toliver cannot forget the torment of her early school years in teensy Hallman, Pennsylvania, where Belinda, Maris, Emma, Chris, Peggy, and Nancy routinely poked fun of her as “Betsy Wetsy”—and once cruelly locked her in the park outhouse along with 22 snakes and nailed it shut just before some unidentified joker outside was slitting do-gooder lifeguard Michael Houseman’s throat. When Liz plans to return to Hallman to tend to the mother who also verbally abused her, both her son and her lover, rock star Jimmy Card, beg her not to, and Jimmy hires Gregor Demarkian, the Armenian-American Poirot, to shield her from trouble—which lately has been stirred up by Maris, who’s been whispering to the tabloids that Liz was responsible for Michael’s death. Liz has barely hit town when there’s a new murder, an evisceration, and another round of jibes from her discontented former tormentors. Still another will die before Gregor, wilting from the heat and stifling from the small-town insularity, solves murders past and present and can return to his big-city home with his beloved Bennis.

Haddam (True Believers, 2001, etc.) flails away at assorted targets with the agility of Lizzie Borden wielding her axe. If her resolution is not quite equal to her lengthy set-up, there are enough trenchant nuggets along the way to entertain most readers.