NIGHT VISION
by Paul Levine
Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter is deputized special prosecutor to investigate the murder of Michelle Diamond, ambitious TV newscaster strangled minutes after she signed off her program detailing the probing questions she planned to ask about her sometime lover D.A. Nick Wolf's role in a suspicious engagement back in Vietnam—and while she's in the middle of a conversation over a computerized sex line. As if Vietnam, the whiff of political corruption, and hi-tech sex weren't enough, evidence in the apartment links the murder to Jack the Ripper, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Tennyson-spouting professor Gerald Prince; and there'll be more murders—as beautiful, remote British serial- killer expert Dr. Pamela Metcalf predicts—involving Wolf's ex-wife, the head of Miami homicide, and the loopy, dangerous couple behind Compu-Mate. Too many subplots and guilty parties—this entry lacks the dazzling tightness of To Speak for the Dead, Jake's brilliant debut last year—but Levine's fiendish ability to create 20 patterns from the same set of clues will have you waiting impatiently for his next.