FINE LINES

Still another departure for multitalented Lehrer — news anchor, playwright, and chronicler of the One-Eyed Mack, Oklahoma's priceless lieutenant governor. This time Mack plays detective when four state representatives are killed: three while he's away overnight in Chicago, the fourth corpse rapidly cooling in his office on his return. Shrugging off the suggestion that somebody's trying to kill every Democrat in Oklahoma, Mack, his back pushed against the wall by cowardly, incompetent Gov. Buffalo Joe Hayman, concentrates on what the late legislators had in common: their 11th-hour support for Rep. Jess Deaton's public education initiative, "Sooner Number One." Would Jess kill legislators he had patently just finished bribing? The answer won't become clear until Mack's waded through his wife, Jackie's, Chocolate Fork Award ceremony, paved the way for the Oklahoma Blue Arrow Bus Lines to try his son Tommy Walt's innovative fuel mixture — ethanol and recycled cooking grease, gone another round with Sandra Faye Parsons, whose all-points request for mummified Americans (Short List, 1992) has borne unexpected fruit, and lucked into a colossally inept FBI sting. Beguiling minor work from a satirist who usually cuts deeper.