PRETTY MAIDS IN A ROW

A ripe, unwittingly riotous hybrid of sex, violence, and true love. Thirteen years ago, a few dozen men at Dominion University competed to fill ``dance cards'' recording their seduction or rape of the greatest number of coeds. Now that those women have risen to positions of power, it's payback time, as the Little Sister Society races to punish the last four offenders within legal bounds before a mysterious nutcase finishes killing them off. The pivotal Little Sister is the newest: Holly Kaufman, an environmental lobbyist who's goaded into checking out the other Sisters by the futile testimony of Cheryl Wallace, ``an award-winning poetess,'' against HUD secretary- designate Sen. Timothy Ziegler. As part of the Sisters' attempt to spark a more successful investigation of ``infamous men's magazine publisher'' Jerry Frampton, the onetime ``King Stud'' who's evidently graduated to kiddie porn, Holly plants an anonymous tip with hotshot Washington Times reporter David Wells, a legendary junior-grade stud. To her dismay, frigid Holly finds herself responding to David's deep, deep kisses, until, not many meetings later, he's making love ``to her fingers, her toes, the sensitive skin behind her knees.'' Meanwhile, Ziegler's been murdered and mutilated (a placard announces ``JUST PUNISHMENT FOR A RAPIST'' for those who miss the point of the graphic visuals)—by alcoholic FBI agent Rachel Greenley, schizoid IRS investigator Bobbi/Roberta Renquist, ``Black Widow'' corporate queen Erica Donner, or somebody outside the Sisters?—and the killer, having dispatched loutish pro footballer Billy O'Day in similar fashion, moves on to Frampton, just as Holly and David, still working at cross- purposes despite their torrid passion, converge on him. The mixture of sex-crime conventions and Harlequin romance rhetoric—a preteen's idea of steamy—produces a hardcover debut too rich for quotation. Must be seen.