GRAVE ENDINGS

If your best friend has been a corpse for six years, she can hardly be your maid of honor.

Los Angeles crime journalist Molly Bloom’s impending marriage to dishy rabbi Zack Abrams has hit a snag. She keeps postponing appointments with calligraphers, caterers, and their ilk to deal with new evidence concerning the unsolved death of her childhood friend, social worker Aggie Lasher. Aggie’s locket, containing a bit of good-luck thread Molly schlepped all the way from Jerusalem, has turned up on the corpse of charmer Randy Creeley, a former junkie who spent his last weeks making 12-step amends to all the people he’d conned. Did he really kill Aggie? And who killed him? The answer lies in the package that someone trashed Randy’s sister’s apartment to find, so scaring her she keeps disappearing. The search by Molly and less friendly others keeps veering back to Rachel’s Tent, the welfare center funded by Horton Enterprises, where both Aggie and Randy worked. Was Randy blackmailing one of the wealthy Hortons? Did Aggie find out? Will Molly meet her friend’s fate? Fear not: Molly survives in time to nosh kosher donuts with her landlord before she and Zack stand under the chuppa.

Molly (Blues in the Night, 2002) keeps getting tangled in plots as threatening as those that confront her sister sleuth Detective Jesse Drake. But if you want a facile tutorial on contemporary females grappling with the orthodox Jewish lifestyle, Molly’s your gal.