ALLEY KAT BLUES

Sacramento p.i. Kat Colorado's fifth case (Wild/Kat, 1994, etc.) gives her plenty of opportunity to do what she does best: fight. She fights with her client, Medora Dillard, who wants Kat to look further than the police will into the hit-and-run death of her daughter Courtney (""They hurt her to death"") -- but who doesn't want to stand up to her Mormon husband who read Courtney out of the family years ago and doesn't feel any more kindly toward her now that she's dead. She fights with her lover, Las Vegas cop Hank Parker, who's taking an awfully close personal interest in the plight of Amber Echo -- a woman fearful that her kid sister, Belle, is the latest victim of the Las Vegas Strip Stalker. She fights -- oh, it seems polite enough, but you're just waiting for the bared fingernails to come out -- with poor dear Amber, whom she befriends incognito. And, in repeated trips between Las Vegas and Sacramento, she fights with all the monstrously manipulative men Courtney Dillard was trying to stand up to, the equally manipulative women who are taking a leaf from their playbook -- and whoever's trying to pull her off the case by smashing her windows, following her, and sending her a funeral wreath, a dead bunny, and five detestable anchovy pizzas. Nobody blows the feminist whistle as shrilly as Kat -- not even in as overemphatic, ill-integrated a tale as this one.