DUE DILIGENCE

St. Louis attorney Rachel Gold is puzzled when she learns that Bruce Rosenthal, an accountant her brand-new lover Rabbi David Marcus recommended her to, is crushed to death in his office building's basement compactor before she can meet with him. But she's devastated when David himself is executed, apparently by anti-Semitic extremists. The police are happy to close the books on David after a raid leaves all the suspects satisfyingly dead; but Rachel's instincts are screaming coverupa silent scream that just gets louder when the only person at Bruce's firm who's interested in what he'd found out about the takeover-ripe pharmaceuticals firm Chemitex gets killed as well. Armed with two documentsa memorandum of Bruce's cryptic questions to himself, and a 20-year-old list of names nobody can identifyRachel and her buddies, teddy-bear vulgarian Prof. Benny Goldberg and newshound Florence Shenker, search high and low (there's an extended climax in the caves beneath St. Louis) for the evidence that will inevitably implicate Rachel's patron saint, liberal Missouri Senator Dr. Douglas Armstrong. An unmysterious suspenser that's by far the weakest of Rachel's five adventures (Firm Ambitions, 1994, etc.), though you do learn a lot about the legal side of medical research and developmentand, through Rachel's new secretary, about the daily problems of aspiring transsexuals.