SEVEN KINDS OF DEATH

Charlie and Constance (Sweet, Sweet Poison, etc.) are having an unspoken fight about attending a party for Constance's girlhood friend Marion—an artist who's having her first touring show in years. Charlie has never liked Marion, and so now Constance heads for Marion's Maryland farmhouse without him. But she's barely there before she wishes she were home again: Marion's students, stepson, husbands (past and present), and art critic Paul Volte are in an uproar—someone has mutilated Marion's crated artwork, and Paul's ex-lover, Victoria, has disappeared, only to turn up later dead in the condo complex being developed by Marion's husband, Max, and his son, Johnny. A phone call for help brings Charlie to the farmhouse fast, and he and Constance, still hesitant with each other, are soon entangled in Marion's various lies, in a particularly demonic Ouija board game, and in frequent visits to the locked condo complex, where they search for clues—which, alas, clever readers will have uncovered before them. Vivid character portrayals, but a promising storyline soon fades as the author burdens it with locked-room puzzle devices that are, to say the least, mechanical and forced. Charlie and Constance, however, still constitute one of mysterydom's better love stories.