POSTCARD FROM HELL

A cryptic postcard distress call from an old friend, fashion designer Astrid Montebello, calls photographer AndrÇ Derain (Bad Girl Blues, 1994) from New Orleans to the Cayman Islands. It's a good time for Andy to leave town anyway, since Crayfish Joe Coquin, gourmand and mobster, is shortly going to be out for his blood over a photo he tactlessly sold to the tabloids. But when Andy hitches a flight out with intrepid glamour-puss pilot Glory Newlands, you'd think his route was Grand Cayman by way of Never- Never Land. Surviving fog, storms, drug drops, the DEA, and an order by Glory's associate, Fabio Machado, for his death, Andy lands in Grand Cayman just in time to hear Astrid's tale of woeher photographer and three models have disappearedand then wake up to find her gone from her hotel. Naturally, Fabio's involved in the disappearance, as is Crayfish Joe; and the piquantly shifting alliances of the bad guys versus the merely devious provide much of this pumped-up, laid-back story's pleasure. The action, though it all has a familiar ring, is well-nigh nonstop: It's as if James Bond had lost the sponsorship of Her Majesty's Government (but not his stable of willing women) and gone into freelance knight-errantry.