CADAVER

Wealthy, attractive nurse Edwina Crusoe (Rigor Mortis, 1991, etc.), newly married to detective Martin McIntyre of New Haven's Homicide division, is now a p.i. specializing in medical cases. She's asked for help by flaky Mona Weissman, whose doctor father shot himself to death in his locked car, engine running. Mona doesn't believe it's suicide; neither does Weissman's secretary, Marcia Larsen, with whom he'd had a long-running, extramarital affair. Meanwhile, the police are preoccupied with the escape of psychotic killer Craig Fellowes from his hospital bed shackles in Chelsea Memorial Hospital, where other bizarre things are happening--the killing of Marcia Larsen in her late boss's ransacked office and the disappearance of a genius researcher who needs the bodyguard provided by his millionaire father. The kidnapping of McIntyre inspires Edwina's sometimes erratic sleuthing instincts to pull all the elements together in a tense windup. Overloaded with plot contrivances but gripping--and the best yet of this series.