KILLER CONDO

In Good’s mystery novel, a struggling writer puts herself and her marriage at risk when she pursues the murder of a Park Avenue denizen.

“You’re already doing the detective thing, I can tell,” Melanie Deming’s husband accuses. “No, the police are on it,” she responds, but he knows better. After selling a screenplay based on the first murder she helped to solve, Deming finds herself with a possible sequel on her hands when she attends an open house for a $4.6 million Park Avenue condo. The first mystery is why she was invited. Though she and her husband, a food writer of some repute with a new cookbook in stores, have enjoyed some recent success, they are not authors of “the John Grisham kind,” and $4.6 million to them is akin to “the GNP of a small nation.” The more pressing mystery is the identity of the killer of Karen Sheldon, whose body is found “sprawled between the toilet and the shower” at the open house. Sheldon is dead, and Deming’s marriage is in serious condition: She has slept with Devon, her writing partner, with whom she shares “wonderful karma,” while her increasingly estranged husband, Daniel, may have something cooking with Nadine, a baker who collaborated with him on his book. “Had I known then what path the murder investigation and my marriage were going to take,” Deming rues. “Many people told me to stop here. But of course I didn’t.” Fans of television’s Elsbeth Tascioni will enjoy the outsider spunk of Good’s fledgling crime reporter; she’s got moxie and is “annoyingly honest.” Sharper writing would make her more formidable, and readers may wish Park Avenue and its wealthy denizens were depicted more vividly. Deming’s simmering passion for Devon is the stuff of romance novels (“I drank in Devon’s warm, compassionate face”), but this cozy-adjacent mystery takes a walk on the mild side when it comes to profanities, violence, and sex.

The only murder in the building entertainingly expands the Demings-verse.