CLOSE TO YOU

More low-impact peril among the felony-prone denizens of New York’s KEY News network (Let Me Whisper in Your Ear, 2000, etc.), the victim this time the most thoroughly stalked news anchor in fiction.

Eliza Blake is 30 years younger and prettier than Rather, Jennings, and Brokaw, so it’s no surprise that everybody loves her. Bartender Cornelius (“Meat”) Bacon shows his love by writing letters criticizing her outfits as too revealing or sluttish. Jerry Walinski shows his by leaving messages on her voice mail at work announcing that he loves her and can’t live without her. KEY producer Keith Chapel shows his love by fantasizing about her as he lies next to his pregnant, uninterested wife, and frustrated lesbian Abigail Snow in the KEY promotion department shows hers by leaving a gift box of Victoria’s Secret lingerie outside her office door with an insinuating note. Even widowed mom Eliza, at first lulled into a sense of security by the house she’s bought in toney HoHoKus, New Jersey, eventually notices that she’s being stalked, perhaps by the very same man responsible for Garden State Network anchor Linda Anderson’s mysterious disappearance five years ago this Halloween. She’d be even better off if she realized that her mechanic has pinched her house key preparatory to robbing her, or that the man who sold her the house is hiding a dire secret about how such a desirable property ever came to be vacant. As Mary Higgins Clark’s ex-daughter-in-law counts down the breathless hours to Halloween, readers can marvel at a suspect pool so deep that some nuts end up protecting Eliza from even nuttier nuts who are trying to elbow their way to the front of the queue.

Eliza finally identifies the biggest nut in the final chapter. Shame on you if it takes you even half as long.