BAD COMPANY

Trashy Monette Bandy, who dropped her panties for any man, no matter how mean or ugly, seems to have dropped them once too often. Her final escapade left her dead in a crevasse in the hills of Laramie, Wyoming, where geologist Hawk Green and history professor Sally Adler, found her body while hiking and alerted her kin, Sheriff Dickie Langham. Sally, who’s nosed around murder before (Brown-Eyed Girl, 2000), is soon nearly a victim herself. During the weeklong celebration of Laramie’s Jubilee Days, she’s pushed into the path of a bucking bronc; her house is broken into and her lingerie destroyed; and someone, perhaps Monette’s drunken coot of a dad, whispers threats over her phone. What does she know without knowing she knows it that’s so dangerous for her? A lot less than Hawk, who uncovers a proposed land swap that would settle unsuspecting nature-lover Molly Wood atop a toxic waste site in exchange for her current home on thousands of ecologically sound acres ripe for development. But it’s Sally who ties the land swap to Monette and an abortive attempt at blackmail and identifies the greedy killers.

Despite all the activity, this sophomore effort is a tad heavy-handed, with too many dysfunctional relatives, too much kissy-kissy between Hawk and Sally, and a final twist that doesn’t quite ring true.