MURDER UNDER THE PALMS

Everybody who's anybody is at the Palm Beach gala marking the 50th anniversary of the loss of the Normandie, sunk after a suspicious wartime fire in New York harbor. And when Charlotte Graham, the actress/sleuth who won an Oscar for the 1939 film The Normandie Affair, finds herself reunited with Eddie Norwood, the piano player she fell in love with during her starry-eyed crossing on the doomed ship, she doesn't want the evening to end. But it's society jeweler Paul Feder that time has stopped for: He's been stabbed to death on the beach outside. The local cops focus on fashion designer Marianne Montgomery, who'd set her cap for Feder and was jealous of his attentions to her daughter Dede, and on Lydia Collins, Dede's boss at the Historical Preservation Association, who had the second-oldest motive in the book. But when Eddie, now a big, big bandleader, confides in Charlotte his plan to ferret out the Fifth Columnists responsible for the Normandie's loss, new possibilities open up—along with vistas of delicious meals, cozy inns, and the couple's attempts to conceal their identities from the less renowned, efforts no more successful than Matteson's attempts to conceal the killer. Charlotte's eighth (Murder Among the Angels, 1995, etc.) supplies all the gilded memories and knickknacks you'd expect from a weekend at a good upscale shopping mall.