BREAKING POINT

There are several murders in this rather too breathless mystery about the slick, sleazy underbelly of the professional tennis circuit, but one real villain: Big Money. Retired tennis pro Jordan Miles (The Total Zone, 1994), forced from the game by a devastating defeat at Wimbledon, now has a successful career as a physical therapist specializing in sports injuries. Her new life and her lingering fame keep her on the outer edge of the inner circle of tennis, and it's while attending a glitzy party during the French Open that she witnesses the murder of a young woman. Against the advice both of her colleagues and the police, Jordan begins to trace the life of the victim. An old friend, a p.i. hired by the girl's parents, is beaten senseless. Jordan, back at the scene of the crime, is pushed from the building's roof (landing unhurt in a manure pile, in the first of several improbable escapes from danger). Eventually, though, the investigation leads Jordan to a duplicitous tennis agent, two sullen, fading tennis stars, several corporate sponsors with more money than morals and a shadowy conspiracy to rig a major tournament. Navratilova and Nickles's second effort works best in its critical portrait of the interests controlling the billion-dollar industry of professional tennis. Some sharp passages on the harried lives of pros and the extraordinary rewards that the game can offer make it, frequently, authentic and lively. There are one too many hairbreadth escapes, though, in a plot that eventually becomes too tangled to be entirely convincing. (Author tour)