THE KILLING CLUB

In what’s got to be a first for a fictional character, Walsh, the police station receptionist on One Life to Live, has “collaborated” with OLTL head writer Malone (The Last Noel, 2002, etc.) on a mystery published in the world outside the realm of daytime drama.

It’s the week before Christmas in Gloria, New Jersey, and Det. Sgt. Giovanna Lucia Ferrara is good and spooked by a blast from her past. Back when Jamie Ferrara was in Hart High School, she banded together with other misfits to form the Killing Club, whose members salved their social slights by competing to imagine the most inventive and undetectable ways to kill their enemies. Now insurance broker Ben Tymosz has died in a fall that started a house fire—exactly the method he’d described for murdering somebody else under cover of accident. And Jamie’s started to get notes quoting dialogue from the movie Halloween, beginning with “Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.” Does this mean that Killing Club member Shawn Tarrini’s fatal one-car crash a few weeks ago wasn’t an accident after all, or that Lyall Hillier, the charter Club member who committed suicide back in high school, isn’t really dead?

OLTL’s producers promise to spin the tale of Marcie Walsh’s authorship and its eerie complications over a whole year of the series. It’s a gimmick that sounds more ingenious than any of the warmed-over devices on display here.