Fall from Grace

Her race for the murderer of San Francisco socialite Jenna Perry brings Homicide Inspector Jane Candiotti face to face with one of the most ruthless villains in the city's history, as well as with her own romantic missteps. Tour.

An encounter on San Francisco's BART leads to murder in TV veteran Phillips's enthralling debut thriller. Depressed by his impending divorce from Pacific Heights heiress Jenna Maxwell Perry, 39-year-old lawyer David Perry confides in lowlife auto mechanic Barton Hubble, who takes it on himself to make Perry a rich man, even if it means killing Jenna. When Perry refuses to acknowledge the favor, Hubble stalks him and his teenage daughter, Lily. Detective Jane Candiotti, pushing 40, is put on the case. Coming off a fading romance of her own, Candiotti begins an amorous entanglement with Perry that compromises her investigation of Jenna's murder and puts her own life at risk. The debt to Hitchcock is obvious, and, like the master, Phillips makes maximum use of regional details?chief (maybe too chief) among them is the Golden Gate Bridge. Also in the Hitchcock manner, the end comes with a double surprise that provides a powerful resolution to the novel's tense action sequences and gathering suspense.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A greedy killer hitches his wagon to an acquaintance's fat inheritance, in TV writer Phillips's TV-ish first novel. Like Barton Hubble, Phillips follows the moneythe $65 million fortune that San Francisco attorney Graham Maxwell's amassed over his career. When a fatal plane crash (secretly engineered by a perfidious mechanic) turns that fortune into a lavish estate that Maxwell's daughter, Jenna Perry, will share with her husband David, Phillips puts the screws to their marriage: David catches Jenna cheating and walks out; Jenna threatens to cut off his visitation rights to Lily, the 13-year-old daughter he adores; David accuses Jenna of using Lily to pressure him into a financial settlement. Enter Hubble, a car mechanic who insinuates himself into David's life, hears about the troubles David's having at home, then obligingly goes out and kills the little woman. Just a favor for a friend, he tells David when he phones to get his blackmail threat rolling: Unless David comes across with a cool $5 million, Hubble, who's obviously seen Strangers on a Train, will plant evidence on the murder scene that'll have the cops hot on David's trail. The plan is diabolical, but Hubble isn't, because his penny-dreadful threats (he'll tip off the cops, he'll find a way to get close to Lily) are constantly getting upstaged by the torrid romance David has kindled with Inspector Jane Candiotti, who prefers his embraces to those of her dependable, boring partner Kenny Marks. As Hubble fumes in the background, David and Jane enjoy romantic trysts overlooking great Bay Area sights and, from time to time, fret over the mounting body count. Knowledgeable fans of the psychokiller genre will see the single surprise in this familiar scenario a long way off; the target audience most likely to be surprised might just as well wait for the inevitable telemovie, which won't have any trouble condensing the story to two hours. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.