LET'S FACE THE MUSIC AND DIE

``Dealing with death on a regular basis has almost made me an expert,'' says Lauren Laurano, whose rueful remark has less to do with her private-eye status than with the high mortality rate among her friends. Latest example: Elissa Rosner, whose aunt, Ruthie Cohen, has been stabbed to death. It's the Granny Killer, say the cops, who then, changing their minds, focus on Elissa, the beneficiary of a big inheritance and no alibi. Convinced that her friends were born to be victims, not killers, Lauren gets Elissa to make a list of Ruthie's friends and guilelessly goes down the list ticking off the names, and sometimes the friends. Since there's not much mystery to Ruthie's death—the sixth friend, when Lauren finally gets around to ringing her doorbell, solves the case on the spot—there's plenty of time for Lauren's abandonment by her lover Kip, her guilty e-mail flirtation with Alexandra Thomas, her stalking by the psycho who started her on her law-enforcement career by raping her and killing her boyfriend 27 years ago, and Scoppettone's trademark vignettes of life in the Big Apple: sunny, pointless episodes that seem culled from the Times's Metropolitan Diary column. A persistent lack of ingenuity and urgency make this the weakest of Lauren's four cases to date (My Sweet Untraceable You, 1994, etc.).