THE CINDERELLA MURDER

The team behind Clark’s reality TV show Under Suspicion (I’ve Got You Under My Skin, 2014) returns to dramatize—all right, solve—another cold case, with welcome help from co-author Burke (All Day and a Night, 2014, etc.).

Rosemary Dempsey has always hated the references to her daughter, Susan, as Cinderella ever since Susan was found in Laurel Canyon Park the morning after her father’s 60th birthday party, a party she passed up for an audition with indie director Frank Parker. Susan made it to within half a mile of Parker’s home before she was strangled after losing a shoe, presumably in a futile attempt to outrace her killer. Now that producer Laurie Moran and the rest of the Under Suspicion crew wants to film a series of interviews about the 20-year-old murder, Rosemary sees the TV show as an opportunity to restore Susan’s individual identity to the figure of a Cinderella who’d left a shoe behind. Susan’s other intimates aren’t so eager to participate. Parker, coming off an Oscar nomination, doesn’t need the publicity. Susan’s old boyfriend, character actor Keith Ratner, has never been very cooperative. Her former UCLA roommates, Madison Meyer and Nicole Melling, have their own secrets to hide. So does her college friend Dwight Cook, who was vaulted into the ranks of Silicon Valley royalty while he was still sitting in professor Richard Hathaway’s computer science class with Susan. It’s up to Laurie and Alex Buckley, the resident lawyer of Under Suspicion who loves her, to figure out why the necklace Susan was wearing the night she died was so much more important than her shoe.

The continuing sleuth easily substitutes for Clark’s interchangeable damsels in distress, and Burke brings a sharp legal eye to the proceedings. This serendipitous series launch, or continuation, will satisfy Clark’s legion of fans and may well win her some new ones.