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HOT SPOT by Michael Craft

HOT SPOT

by Michael Craft

Pub Date: June 17th, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28900-6
Publisher: Minotaur

It’s a bittersweet wedding for Chicago attorney Roxanne Exner, since although she dearly loves Carl Creighton, the Democratic Illinois deputy attorney general now running for lieutenant governor, she’s still pining for both the highly inaccessible Wisconsin friends who are hosting the event and giving her away, Dumont Daily Register publisher Mark Manning and his life partner, architect Neil Waite. The politically connected guests at the ceremony raise the temperature even more. Local philanthropist Betty Gifford Ashton, 80, invited at the request of Roxanne’s law-school mentor, who’s tying the knot, is escorted by Blain Gifford, the nephew who’s managing the campaign of Republican gubernatorial candidate Raymond Gifford, Mrs. Ashton’s cousin. Tensions are already running high when the elderly matriarch keels over, the victim of an accidental electrocution that looks anything but accidental—and that swiftly implicates Roxanne. When Carl’s running mate indicates his plans to drop Carl from the ticket unless his bride is exonerated, Mark (Boy Toy, 2000, etc.) suddenly finds that he has only 48 hours to sort through an unusually rich crop of suspects, from the caterers whose marital difficulties seem suspicious to Blain Gifford, an opportunistic homophobe who could be gay himself, to Carl’s daughter Lauren, whose scorching lack of affection for her new stepmother just might have boiled over to another target.

Beneath Craft’s trademark gay-rights updates is another sly retro puzzler complete with formal gatherings, understated gossip, half a dozen red herrings, and clues by the bushel. The best of Mark’s six cases to date.