KILLED IN FRINGE TIME

More trouble for the already much-troubled TV vice-president (in charge of ``Special Projects'') Matt Cobb: somebody's fed late-night prima donna Richard Bentyne a dose of payback for all the poison he's been spewing out ever since joining the Network. Mysteriously ignoring Bentyne's potentially lethal food allergy, the killer has dusted his fried chicken with 11 secret herbs and spices, including arsenic. Commanded to hush the bad publicity by finding the murderer, Matt turns up scads of suspects with plausible motives: Bentyne's producer and live-in ex-lover Vivian Pike; psychotically ambitious associate producer Marcie Nast, who's successfully thrown her hot bod at Bentyne, and Marcie's pathologically protective brother Peter; and crazy Barbara Bentyne Anapole, who's convinced against all the evidence that Bentyne is the son she gave up for adoption years ago. But which of the suspects, Matt wonders, hated Bentyne enough to send the man a letter bomb after he was already dead? Avoiding the extravagant artifices and improbabilities that strained Matt's last case (Killed on the Rocks, 1990), this sixth outing combines appealingly low-key narration and one of DeAndrea's cleverest solutions. Fans of the traditional whodunit will gobble it up.