BY EVIL MEANS

Ever since her cop brother Ben killed himself three years ago this spring, Billings, Montana, p.i. Phoebe Siegel, a former cop herself, doesn't do March. She's ripping the pages for March out of her desk calendar when distraught Mary Kuntz persuades her to investigate the transformation of her daughter Jennifer--whose psycho behavior, obviously influenced by her stay at Dr. Victor Stroud's Whispering Pines clinic, is now way out of control. Before Phoebe's done, she'll have tied Jennifer to an affair with Ben, the expected mayhem at Whispering Pines, ugly rumors about the old-money head of the Montana Investigations Bureau, and more dirty cops than you can fire a Smith & Wesson at. A fiercely tangled first novel, with maybe a few too many subplots, villains, and fade-outs as Phoebe's getting the shakes again.