PRETTY BOY

Unlike her boyfriend Hugo, who complains endlessly about the plumbing—the bathwater’s tepid, the tub’s too small to have sex in—sculptor and London sophisticate Samantha Jones actually enjoys spending New Year’s Eve in Lesser Swinfold, where she’s gone to meet Janine Burrows, the latest girlfriend of Sam’s best friend Tom. And she enjoys it even more once Alan Fitzwilliam, a 20-something poet with a perfectly pouty mouth and bone structure to die for, appears on the scene. So even though she’s back in London, hard at work on her latest project—a set of giant motorized cockroaches memorializing her abduction and imprisonment by animal rights activists (Chained, 2001)—when she learns that Janine’s been killed and Tom arrested, she rushes eagerly back to the countryside in hopes of another glimpse of her budding Lord Byron. Sans Hugo, of course; instead, she takes her assistant Lurch, who’s on vacation from art school and who has the uncanny knack of making himself welcome in the most unlikely places. Except for Tom’s motherly landlady, Emma Warwick, and Janine’s sister-in-law Tamsin, who tries hard to ignore the rantings of her husband Andy, the Swinfolders have more or less closed ranks against Tom. But Sam’s grit and Lurch’s East End charm prove more than enough to ferret out the real killer.

Who’da thunk that beneath Sam’s black rubber dress beat the heart of an Amanda Quick heroine? Fetish garb aside, Henderson’s fifth is a standard which-man-should–I-choose romance with mystery on the side.