CRASH COURSE

Who'd make a better murder victim than a used-car salesman? You'd think Jackleen Canaday, the struggling waitress at St. Petersburg's Fountain of Youth Hotel, would be delighted when somebody takes out Jeff Cantrell, the slick article who sweet- talked her into buying the red Corvette with a bleeding transmission, a deceptively elderly odometer, and a frame battered from multiple collisions. But when the Corvette is swiped off the street before it's one payment old, and Jackie returns to stake out Bondurant Motors, she's not overjoyed to find Jeff's corpse bundled into the Vette. And she's even less happy when the cops, responding to her call, don't find any trace of either Jeff's body or its pride-of-Detroit coffin. Though her friend, retired newsman Truman Kicklighter (Lickety-Split, 1996, not reviewed), has his suspicions, Jackie doesn't know she's stumbled onto a Bondurant-backed insurance scam whose operators are such loose cannons (from the onetime footballer who wholesales meat and drugs from the back of his truck to owner Ronnie Bondurant, who sees Jeff's surgically enhanced girlfriend as just another challenge for the body shop) that the good guys would have them nailed in a St. Pete minute if they weren't even more disorganized. Easygoing Florida intrigue—a step up from Trocheck's Callahan Garrity series (Heart Trouble, 1996, etc.)—for audiences who aren't ready for the high-speed rigors of Carl Hiaasen and Laurence Shames. (Author tour)