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Concert violinist Weber’s sexy, silly fifth novel (Devil’s Food, 1995, etc.) continues the adventures of concert violinist/secret agent Leslie Frost, now investigating the steamy affairs of a lecherous US President to discover who killed a fellow spy. Frost, who calls herself —a two-bit narcissist who wished to die recognizable,— is a member of a supersecret corp of gorgeous female spies code-named after the Seven Sisters women’s colleges. Frost (code name: Smith) finishes a command performance before leering US President Bobby Marvel and then discovers the stiffening, nude corpse of blonde bombshell Polly Mason (code name: Barnard) in a sumptuous suite at the infamous Watergate Hotel. Among her possessions is a videotape of Mason having champagne-soaked bathtub sex with President Marvel, as well as an admission ticket to a fund-raiser at Ford’s Theater, where Frost finds herself surrounded by scheming Washington types, including the President, his hideously dressed First Lady, Paula, their doting his-and-hers press secretaries, Justine Cortot (in love with Bobby) and lesbian Vickie Chickerling (definitely not in love with Bobby), frustrated composer Bendix Kaar, the mysteriously epicene bon vivant Fausto Kiss, and brittle Senator Aurilla Perle, who is grooming herself to be the next vice-president after the current veep, dies of dengue fever. What should be a zesty, slightly skewed whodunit chilled with Frost’s delightfully bitchy put-downs becomes a tepid bog as Frost dodges arrows while chasing the vice-president’s pathologist brother Louis in Belize, falls for Fausto’s tragically sophisticated languor, and tangles with a man who resembles the President both in and out of bed. Tediously rococo plotting blunts the sly, overheated comedy of scheming dragon-ladies with great facelifts, and spineless mama’s boys who don’t know Brahms from Berlioz.