#Sleepytime boyfriend lawyer skin

''Be a warrior.'' Du Pre, who is descended from a Canadian tribe of wanderers, not warriors, can't save a brain-damaged teenager who throws himself down a well but he can Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) from an old medicine man. Gabriel Du Pre, the plain-spoken, deep-thinking Montana cattle inspector in Peter Bowen's earthy mysteries, gets his marching orders in THE STICK GAME (St. I want to kill you.'') But, in a stylistic twist that is rare for this genre, the focus of the suspense remains locked on his victims, smart, articulate women who reveal their escalating fears in intimateįirst-person narratives that are insightful and also sad, because the lessons learned come too late. Nicci French (the pseudonym of the British journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) gives the killer terrifying presence through the perverse ''love'' letters he sends to his victims. ''I was going to fight,'' she vows - to the delight of her secret watcher. Only Nadia, with her flexible mind and disorderly life, Model with perfectionist views on marriage and motherhood, comes to realize that the emotional prison she has made of her life is an open invitation to predators. I didn't want anyone to notice me.'' Jenny, a former ''I think it was to do with being in London,'' she tells a friend. ''I've been passive,'' says Zoe, a young nursery-school teacher whose life loses its focus after Something about herself - that special something that makes her irresistible to a psychopath. But before they do, each one will discover

#Sleepytime boyfriend lawyer skin

One by one, the three women in Nicci French's insinuating tale of sexual obsession, BENEATH THE SKIN (Mysterious Press/Warner, $24.95), will walk into the arms of the murderous sadist who is stalking them. It's hard to say exactly what kind of tale Pyper has told, but there's no doubt that he has told it brilliantly. Talking to himself in tones of corrosive sarcasm, he broods on the dead, keeps returning to the lake and loses himself in horrid visions of ''black-eyed girls in ragged dressesĪnd bare feet'' who beckon to him from the corners of his mind. Christopher, where the missing schoolgirls were presumedĭrowned, Barth becomes unhinged. Unnerved by his isolation and haunted by the local myth of a mysterious Lady who lives in the depths of Lake St.

His own morally bankrupt soul - another staple device for books of this kind.īut from then on, everything about this dark, disquieting story confounds expectations. Once he meets his mentally shattered client, a schoolteacher accused of killing two students whose bodies have yet to be found, there is also ample opportunity for the arrogant lawyer to redeem In that it presents a Toronto defense attorney named Barth Crane with his first homicide case (''dirty, ugly and unwinnable'') and dispatches him to the cold North Country (''an interminable expanse of humanlessness'')įor his comeuppance. What do you call a legal thriller that is populated by ghosts and madmen and features a protagonist who is having a spectacular nervous breakdown? LOST GIRLS (Delacorte, $23.95), an elegantly written debut novel by Andrew Pyper, follows standard procedures Their own idiom - and catch them at their own wicked games. His expert sleuthing techniques (''blunder around, ask questions, get in people's way, be annoying''), he manages to pick up enough regional skills to communicate with the devious natives in Turn out to be so tough they don't need our brawny hero to settle a brawl.Īll this culture shock brings out a certain waggishness in Spenser, who is fascinated by the elaborately staged lives of the horsy set and more amused than appalled by the character flaws he uncovers beneath all the polite gentility. The deputy sheriff drolly assures him that ''nothing makes us dumb Southern boys happier than having a smart Yankee show up to help us.'' And the gay clientele at the Bath House Bar and Grill

Spenser's ''Northern charm'' is dismissed as ''an oxymoron'' by his client's sassyĭaughter. Local climate, cuisine and intelligence quotient. ''I felt like I had just wandered into a Johnny Mercer lyric,'' cracks Spenser, who also has witty words for the To investigate the baffling attacks on thoroughbred racehorses at Three Fillies Stables. Parker's HUGGER MUGGER (Putnam, $23.95), until his Boston private eye, Spenser, heads for rural Georgia By MARILYN STASIO t's sleepy time down South in Robert B.