DEAD FILE

Anchorwoman/sleuth Maxie (The Reporter, 2002) returns in the colorless case of the poisoned dietary supplement magnate.

Stunning Gillian Rose, co-founder of Rose International, the nation’s leading purveyor of vitamins and minerals, has met with foul play. That’s big, big news in la-la-land, and no one has to tell Maxie Poole to grab a cameraperson and go. After all, you don’t become a “highly rated anchor-reporter” at Channel Six without, well, moxie. And since Maxie just happens to have the code to an enabling back elevator, she’s soon staring down at the lifeless vitamin queen’s “well-toned body clad in simple chic.” But hold everything. The corpse’s slightly open “dusky charcoal brown eyes” don’t have it. Gillian Rose, as the world of designer supplements knows full well, had eyes of “vivid, sparkly, cerulean blue.” A conundrum indeed. But it’s not the only knotty problem Maxie has to wrap her steel-trap mind around. There’s the tug of war between love and ambition, for instance. Is an office romance with reporter/stud Richard Winningham a good career move? No way, Maxie staunchly declares, even if being with him makes “my heart explode out of my body.” So it’s back to a murder case in which suspects abound—though the puzzle is so obvious that no veteran crime fiction reader or career criminal would give it the time of day.

Strictly by the numbers, and not many numbers at that.