Synopsis
Preparing for fatherhood, Kyle Malachi kills off his tiresome alter-ego, fictional mystery critic Stokes Moran, only to find himself a suspect in the murder of Stokes, a man who never existed but is suddenly a dead body in New York City. 10,000 first printing.
Reviews
Piqued that his agent/wife, Lee Holland, has sold his first mystery novel by ignoring his demand that she keep the author's name a secret and instead telling the publisher that it's the work of nationally syndicated mystery reviewer Stokes Moran, Kyle Malachi decides to take strong measures against his tiresomely successful pseudonym by phoning the New York Times to announce Moran's death. After all, he figures, if being dead doesn't work out, he can always resurrect his alter ego la Conan Doyle. But Moran's return from his own Reichenbach Falls comes a lot faster than Malachi or Lee could have expected when the NYPD phones to ask Lee if she'd mind coming in to identify Moran's corpse. Yes, only a few hours after Malachi decided to kill off his fictional self, somebody has already found, at the bottom of an airshaft, the body of a man carrying Moran's identification. Finding out who it is, and who killed him and why, will require Malachi, whose response to every crisis is to cite some parallel from detective fiction, to do a striptease on a city street, visit a bordello that caters to very exclusive tastes, and follow the winding trail back to an unexpectedly logical endpoint. Malachi is less insufferable than in And Then There Were Ten (1995), though the target audience remains hard-core puzzle-addicts stuck on a train between double-crostics. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In a fit of pique, well-known mystery reviewer Kyle Malachi phones the New York Times with the news that Stokes Moran, his pseudonym, has died. The next thing he knows, New York police suspect him of murdering an actual person by that name. Malachi, typically, goes wild in his self-defense: he trades his clothes for information from a bag lady; he wades through an anti-Charlie Chan demonstration in Chinatown; he interrogates a devious transvestite in Chelsea. Standard mystery situations?not always successfully tongue-in-cheek?and references to other mysteries and writers punctuate this moderately humorous effort. For series fans.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Under the name Stokes Moran, Kyle Malachi writes mystery reviews, and in "real life," he's happily married to his former agent, Lee, who's pregnant with the couple's first child. Lately, though, Kyle has grown tired of Stokes and, in a fit of pique, decides to "kill" the fictional reviewer by publishing a fake obituary in the newspaper. The next day, a body carrying identification for Stokes Moran is discovered in a deserted airshaft. Where did the body come from? And was it a coincidence that the corpse turned up the day after the obituary appeared? When the cops turn up to question him as a murder suspect in the death of "Stokes Moran," Kyle sets out to nab the real killer. Fortunately, he knows everything there is to know about solving mysteries--after all, he's reviewed thousands of them. Though it's more fluff than substance, this fourth Stokes Moran novel offers an inventive plot and some likable characters. Lightweight fun. Emily Melton
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