CHUTES AND ADDERS: First Robin Light Title.

The widow of the shady, unlamented Murphy, amateur detective Robin Light inherits a Syracuse pet shop, but her legacy turns deadly when a mysterious package and the sudden death of her assistant leave Robin a prime suspect in murder.

This sharp-edged and wry mystery takes off quickly when an employee of Robin Light's marginally profitable pet store in Syracuse, N.Y., dies painfully after opening a package containing a highly poisonous and aggressive snake. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the most venomous creatures in Block's debut novel are the two-legged kind. Robin, recently widowed when her criminally inclined husband Murphy died of a cocaine overdose, becomes prime suspect in the killing when $50,000 is found hidden away in the store, leading the thoroughly nasty cops to assume that Murphy was trading in protected animals. When Robin finds another $20,000 hidden in her apartment, she begins a search for the killer that leads her into bizarre interviews with a street thug (who later winds up beaten into a coma), a neighbor (who ends up dead, pushed off his balcony) and a sadistic zookeeper (who wisely remains silent); a smarmy lawyer and a sinister landlord add spice and complications. What seems to tie all these disparate folk together is the Latin American religion of Santeria--truly an odd practice to be popping up in bitterly cold upstate New York. Robin is an engaging, if stubborn and reckless, amateur sleuth whom readers will look forward to meeting again.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Snakes! A saw-scaled viper, sent in a package, kills a clerk at Noah's Ark, the Syracuse, NY, pet store run by journalist Robin Light after the death of her no-account husband, Murphy, who was always trying to get rich the easy way until he died of a cocaine overdose. When the police find $50,000 hidden in the store, Robin discovers that Murphy and the clerks had been trafficking in illegal snakes and a few other goodies, such as a severed head, shipped, it seems, for use in a Caribbean witchcraft ritual. On top of all this, the police, led by surly detective Donnella Lorenzo, think that Robin is the killer. Supported by breakfasts of coffee, chocolate bars, and handfuls of vitamins; warmed by Camels and increasing quantities of booze; and bailed out occasionally by Murphy's old friend George Samson, a 6' 4'', 300-lb., ``blue black'' police detective, Robin searches for the murderer. Like a Kinsey Millhone wannabe, Robin travels through the cold underbelly of Syracuse in her own idiosyncratic car: a made-over Checker cab, the set of wheels that reminds her of her New York City home and the vehicle that Block's publishers hope will carry Robin through a thriving detective series. An interesting debut, but grisly and not for the serpent-shy. Robin has a slithering encounter with a king cobra and feeds crickets to reptiles. A modern-day Eve, she can look a snake in its cold eye; it's the large spiders she can't stand. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Troubling events fall like dominoes on pet shop owner Robin Light after the drug-related death of her beloved husband. A poisonous snake mailed to the shop bites and kills one of her employees, placing her under police suspicion; she discovers cash and a gun, which are subsequently stolen by a Latino who gets bashed in Robin's shop; and she discovers that her husband smuggled endangered animals for money, for which she is blamed by some bad-attitude cops. Full of action and excitement-Robin subsists on chocolate and coffee-this new series debut works because of its slightly exaggerated plot, one that teases reader credibility just enough.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Set in Syracuse, Block's terrific first novel starts off with a bang as the assistant in Robin Light's pet shop, John, opens a package addressed to him and dies from the bite of the enclosed saw-scaled viper. When the police search the store for the missing snake, they find $50,000 in a heating vent, wrapped in a handwritten price list of endangered or venomous snakes and lizards, some illegal to import. Robin recognizes the handwriting as that of her late husband, Murphy, who has recently died of a cocaine overdose. The police conclude that Robin, Murphy, and John were involved in an illegal scheme gone wrong and that Robin murdered John to silence him. Already struggling with her own stalled career as a journalist--the pet store was Murphy's--Robin feels in no shape to defend herself. So begins a roller coaster of a novel in which Robin must deal with a herpetologist with a penchant for spitting cobras, a shipment of snakes that includes a severed head, and her growing sense of betrayal as she begins to realize that she may have trusted her late husband a little too much. Block offers an appealing central character and a truly enthralling plot with a wham-bang ending. This is a special book: don't miss it. Stuart Miller