THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

While most of Sanders' thrillers (the Deadly Sin series, The Passion of Molly T., etc.) tend to be lurid psychodramas, his Commandment novels (this is the third) offer a milder, more old-fashioned brand of murder-mystery—padded out to Big-Book length with New Yorky atmosphere and faintly offbeat character-comedy. And this time the somewhat cutesy narrator-sleuth is young Mary Lou Bateson, a.k.a. Dunk, a 6'2 numismatist from Des Moines—whose early career in New York is reviewed in the enticing opening chapters here. When the plot proper begins, however, things become much more routine. Mary Lou, now in charge of coins at the Grandby & Sons auction-house, has had her first big triumph: wealthy Archibald Havistock has chosen Grandby to auction off his huge, priceless coin collection-including a Greek treasure (to the tune of $350,000) called the Demaretion! But disaster soon follows—when the case containing the Demaretion is replaced with an empty duplicate during the transfer of the collection from the Havistock townhouse to Grandby & Sons. Who stole the coin? That's the question for amateur sleuth Mary Lou (out to clear her own name), who soon determines that the theft must have been an inside job. So the chief suspects are all Havistock family members: Archibald's flaky older daughter, who (with her creepy husband) dabbles in spouse-swapping and home porno; younger daughter Natalie, a zonked-out rebel/kleptomaniac with a bisexual, dangerous black boyfriend; son Luther, a loser with a promiscuous sexpot-wife named Vanessa; and nephew Orson, Havistock, Sr.'s slimy secretary (also bisexual). And things get more complicated—if not much more interesting—when the Havistocks are soon also revealed to be involved in murder (three corpses), blackmail, and heavy-duty psychopathology. None of the solutions—to the murders or the theft—is especially surprising or satisfying. Mary Lou's sleuthing is a predictable round-robin of chats with the kinky Havistocks. But her blooming love-life—simultaneous affairs with the two official investigators on the case (a sloppy cop, a rakish insurance-shamus)—provides a modicum of racy romantic charm. And, despite the terribly dated sound of Sanders' slangy/vulgar dialogue, there's enough glossy pep here to make this passably engaging entertainment: one of the old pro's distinctly lesser entries.