MISFORTUNE

At the Fair Lawn Country Club in snooty Southampton, enclave of the insufferably rich and the just plain insufferable, the membership committee is meeting to consider the eligibility of a batch of new applicants including handsome, well-respected cardiologist Henry Lewis. By any legitimate measure, he ought to be a shoo-in, but he isn’t. Wrong color. “Henry Lewis doesn’t belong here,” says Clio Pratt, who’s threatening (ouch) a blackball. When Clio turns up dead a few days later, presumably courtesy of homicide, Dr. Lewis is an obvious suspect. As Frances Pratt soon discovers, however, her stepmother has disenchanted a fair number of others. For starters, there’s the business partner Clio exploited, then cheated. There’s the embittered widow, still bleeding from the sharp side of Clio’s tongue. And, of course, there’s Frances herself and her younger sister, who have suffered grievously as the unloved children of an icy foster parent. Though she’s an Assistant District Attorney from Suffolk County, the scene of the crime, Frances has been warned off by her boss for reasons that remain as murky as they’re bound to be futile. For her invalid father’s sake, and even, in an odd way, for her detested stepmother’s, Frances feels impelled to probe—and so finds an answer she dearly wishes she hadn’t.

The intricacies of Southampton snobbery aren’t enough to lift this painfully slow debut from the commonplace. If lugubrious Frances is planned as a series heroine, as it seems she might be, she’s going to need a jolt of something to pep her up.