HIGH FALL

Ten years after dying on a fiery Hollywood set in the ill-fated film Bad Companions, nonpareil stuntman Greg Gaige is back in the news. Lark Sondervoil, an unflappable 19-year-old stuntwoman, has mastered the Gaige Move, a fiendishly difficult gymnastic maneuver, and she invites the San Diego press to watch her segue from the Move to a high fall from a cliff in a new movie. But somebody moves Lark's starting marker, and she goes over the wrong cliff. Watching her are pathologist-shamus Kiernan O'Shaughnessy (Not Exactly a Brahmin, 1985, etc.), whose life Greg had touched briefly but decisively, and five of the people who were on the set the day Greg died: a jinxed second-unit director; a producer; a media liaison; a pesky studio brat; and the stuntman whom Greg had replaced in Bad Companions. Whodunit, how, and why? To find out, versatile Kiernan will masquerade as a union representative to crash the studio screening of the fatal rushes; sneak into the San Diego morgue for a freelance autopsy; and break into Lark's studio, only to run into the burglar who's already there. Along the way, there'll be such an engaging series of conversations, so many telling forensic details, and such a sure sense of the leading players that only the captious would complain about the disappointing revelations at the end.