LAND KILLS

New York City editor Mitch Stevens, brought to Vermont for the summer to relieve his ailing friend Ham Johnson as editor of the Southborough Courier, soon finds himself up to his neck in murder (a real-estate agent, a diabetic professor, a Russian violinist). Behind all three deaths: a few leading citizens' attempts to clear away the obstacles from a proposed ski resort and retail outlet. One of these citizens is the Courier's publisher, and the most entertaining scenes in this first novel show Mitch laboring to do his job without destroying the newspaper or the town. Not much mystery, despite all those murders, though the pointed small-town editing vignettes are bound to enliven the promised series.