FAMILY SKELETONS

A breezy, fun, and woefully unconvincing debut featuring hausfrau-of-all-hobbies Victory O'Shea of the historic German town of New Kassel, Missouri. Young Victory is approached after her costumed tour of an antique-furnished landmark to do a genealogy for a well-groomed but rather glum lady who was long ago deserted by her father. (Victory, among various civic activities, makes an occasional buck doing family trees; meanwhile, if you can believe it, her divorced, wheelchair-bound mother keeps track of Victory's house, husband, chicken coop, and two preschoolers.) Now, Victory traces Norah Zumwalt's father to a nearby town, then finds her client bloodily murdered. Swiftly adding killer-catching to her list of interests, and perhaps egged on by a sexily adversarial relationship with the police chief who once jailed her for speeding, she uncovers a snakepit of neurotic motivations among Norah's ex-husband, grown children, and perhaps unfaithful lover. Further complications arise when Victory discovers that Norah's father has a largely fabricated identity. And then the Mississippi overflows. . . . MacPherson does okay by her cute heroine but—while she pioneers the excellent fictional entrÇe of genealogical research— is helpless to exploit the fear, grief, and sheer bloody-mindedness that lead to violence here. Stressed female readers may feel that her supermom deserves a case and possibly a career of her own.