PRAY AND DIE

Whitelaw, whose most recent mysteries have featured cats in starring roles, launches her new, all-too-human heroine with this entry in the plucky-single-woman-in-danger genre. After an acute sense of irony washes out her promising career on the Latching, West Sussex, police force, Jordan Lacey turns her talents to private investigation. She sets up shop in a derelict antique store and finds herself some clients: a family whose pet tortoise disappeared and a woman threatened by hate mail. Within two weeks, she’s sold a hand-painted fan, a chamber pot, a Panama hat, and a chipped Dresden shepherdess, and found Joey the tortoise “in the middle of the A27, heading toward Southampton.” She’s also developed an uncontrollable urge to send hate mail of her own to the other client, Ursula Carling, a nasty piece of work who’s stolen her sister’s sweetheart, hounded her daughter out of the house, quarreled with her neighbors, and lied to Jordan, sending her out on one false lead after another. But someone who hates Ursula even more than Jordan sends her to the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning. Worst of all, Jordan finds one of Ursula’s despised neighbors hanging from a meat hook in an abandoned hotel. So reluctantly, she sticks with the case, not out of loyalty to her client but out of professional pride, curiosity, and a desperate determination to attract the attention of Latching’s firm-of-gaze, firm-of-body Detective Inspector James.

Ingenious plotting and crisp dialogue rescue this oversentimental heroine’s debut from the perils of melodrama.