MURDER IN FIFTH POSITION

Dance patrons are dropping like flies in this nimble ballet murder mystery, the fifth installment in Robbins’ On Pointe series.

Aging, knee-sore ballerina-turned-amateur detective Leah Siderova, a principal dancer with New York’s American Ballet Company, is up for a choreography prize for her new ballet when Leland Vanderhof, the prize’s wealthy sponsor, takes a 16-story swan dive from his balcony during a swanky fundraiser. Leah suspects murder and starts investigating at the behest of Leland’s widow, Arabella. Suspects include the icy Arabella herself and her fashion-designer lover; Arabella’s sullen assistant, Derrick, who benefits from Leland’s will; ABC’s scheming interim director, Marty Sherrington; Hollis Mark and Sierra Younger, Leah’s bitchy rivals for the prize; and Jonathan Llewellyn Franklin III, a lecherous Vanderhof Foundation board member who gets scratched off the list when he turns up dead from blunt-force trauma and carbon monoxide poisoning. Leah gets help from her usual entourage, including her mystery-writer mother, Barbara; ABC’s primeval ballet mistress Madame Maksimova and her gigantic Ukrainian sidekick, Olga; and abrasive NYPD detective Jonah Sobol, who fences with Leah over her interference in the case when he’s not passionately bedding her. The plot thickens as Leah glimpses a man following her, gets flummoxed when both Arabella and Barbara disappear, and deploys her dance-honed ability to read body language for emotional clues when pumping people for information. Along the way, Robbins details the grueling life of a ballerina—the constant aches and pains, the obsessive calorie counting, and the plangent awareness of time inexorably running out. (“The end comes for all of us. Is anyone ever ready for that farewell performance?”) Robbins’ characters are colorful and sharply drawn, and her prose is rich in psychological nuance conveyed through physical tension. (“I pressed the sharp end of a stiletto heel into his foot. I didn’t slam it with enough force to break any bones, which my leg muscles easily could have done. Just hard enough to let him know there were limits to how far he could push me.”) Robbins delivers another page-turner with deep emotional resonance.

A charming whodunit with graceful writing and real heart.