DEADLY ARIA

Mark Holland, playboy manager of opera stars and musicians (Deadly Variations, Deadly Cadenza), receives a gift box of fine chocolates at his Geneva office. The first person to sample the candy (a visitor to the office) promptly drops dead of cyanide poisoning. Who's trying to kill Mark? Could ft be someone from his past as a top UK intelligence agent? The mystery nags at him as he travels to London to see superstar-client Bianca Morini through her Covent Garden opening as Butterfly. Once in England, Mark becomes convinced that the attacks on him (others follow) are linked to his 1976 mission to Prague: a would-be defector (a USSR colonel) was murdered before his very eyes. Could Ruzena, the young Czech woman who helped Mark escape from Prague, have been an enemy agent? (Thanks to Mark, she now lives in London.) Could it be that Mark unknowingly possesses some crucial fact about the identity of a high-placed mole in British intelligence? So go the familiar, le-CarrÉ-manque stewings--as more corpses (Ruzena, retired UK spymaster Willis) surface, the lethal assaults on Mark continue, and unsurprising secrets about the ugly spy system are revealed. Standard, rather slow-moving espionage/mystery--with a few bursts of action (including a backstage scuffle during a Covent Garden dress-rehearsal) and a barely peripheral role for Mark's classical music-biz career.