DO YOU PROMISE NOT TO TELL?

A second trip to KEY Evening Headlines (Do You Want to Know a Secret?, 1998) discloses another intrigue and an equally imperiled single career-woman. Two such women, in fact, if you count Patricia Devereaux, the consignment-shop owner whose inquisitive son Peter discovers that an elderly Russian emigrÇe named Olga, who’s placed many lovely items with Pat over the years, is still in possession of one last treasure: the Moon Egg, a FabergÇ creation for the Romanovs that opens to reveal a comet-shaped spray of diamonds. Peter’s glimpse of the Moon Egg would have been exciting under any circumstances; what makes it mind-boggling is that New York’s Churchill Auction House has just announced the sale of their own Moon Egg, sans diamonds, to an anonymous buyer for $6 million. When Peter tells KEY news producer Farrell Slater, his mom’s old friend, about Olga’s egg, Farrell, who’s known she was on her way out of KEY ever since executive producer Range Bullock declined to air her report on the Churchill sale, senses the story of her Emmy-laden career. Even as Pat is reluctantly bringing Churchill’s purchaser, retired prima ballerina Nadine Paradise, together with Olga, Farrell is laboring to prove that the Moon Egg Nadine bought is a fake, and that Churchill president Clifford Montgomery knew it was. Working as a tag team, the two plucky heroines aren’t in time to prevent several murders, but it isn’t giving too much away to say that in the double-quick march from Ash Wednesday to Easter, they help unmask the perps, save Farrell’s job, and find a bit of romance in a world studded with diverting subplots and enough reassuringly predictable character types to give Brighton Beach and Westwood, New Jersey, their own votes in Congress. Just the bauble to keep fans of Mary You-Know-Who Clark efficiently entertained while they’re waiting for the next installment from the author’s ex-mother-in-law.