SHARP EDGES

Perhaps Krentz's fiction (Grand Passion, 1994, etc.) ought to be packaged with madeleines, if only to reinforce the sense of dÇjÖ vu her fans must feel with every page, tripping over bits and pieces that have been used in her historical romances, written as Amanda Quick, and that may well be incorporated in her science-fictional ones, written as Jayne Castle. But possibly the imaginative recycling of plot and character is the only way one author can turn out so many pseudonymous bestsellers and have them be more than typing exercises, which Krentz does admirably. Here, Eugenia Swift, director of Seattle's Leabrook Museum, which specializes in old glass, is off to Frog Cove Island, ostensibly to catalogue the plummy collection bequeathed to the Leabrook by Adam Daventry, an unsavory connoisseur who collected female artists, along with their work, and who died after falling down a flight of stairs. In truth, though, Eugenia has another agenda: to look into the death of Nellie Grant, an artist friend who disappeared in a boating accident the day after Daventry's death. To her chagrin, Eugenia is forced by her benefactress, Tabitha Leabrook, a sweet little old lady with a fondness for plastic surgery, to take along private investigator Cyrus Chandler Colfax. As it turns out, Cyrus, who's supposedly along to assure Daventry's executors that his death was indeed accidental, also has his own agenda: to locate a fourth-century Roman glass cup stolen three years earlier by corrupt collector Damien March, who shot the p.i. and then murdered his wife. Confined together in Glass House, Daventry's three-story stately chunk of crystal and mirrors, Eugenia and Cyrus solve their respective mysteries—including, of course, the requisite sweet mystery of life. Krentz's usual lilting, charming prose and slightly eccentric characters find themselves at the service of a regrettably pedestrian suspenser.