TAKE IT OFF, TAKE IT ALL OFF

In 1945 soon after D-Day, Rhonda Silverstar, stripper and amateur sleuth, searches for the murderer of one of her backup girls, the Starlettes. By the author of Passion Flowers.

Novelist and biographer Ritz ( Passion Flowers ; Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye ) sets his latest hardboiled mystery in New York City and environs shortly after V-E Day in 1945. Rhonda Silverstar (nee Silverstern), the Brooklyn-born stripper currently headlining at Plotsky's Burlesque in Newark, N.J., is appalled when Tush, one of her back-up girls, is brutally murdered and the police don't seem to care. Rhonda sets out to investigate the murder herself, but as she finds out more about Tush's past, more mysteries unfold. The daughter of Ohioan fundamentalist Christians, Tush became a jazz singer and may or may not have had a lesbian affair with close friend and mentor Billie Holiday. She also slept with an awful lot of men, possibly including Rhonda's boyfriend Bull. From a veritable rogue's gallery of suspects, the sleuthing stripper uncovers an unexpected killer, which leads to a farfetched, action-packed ending. Aggressive, foul-mouthed and unapologetic about her interest in sex, Rhonda is an unusual, mostly appealing heroine, especially in her post-war setting. Her raunchy, sometimes ugly tale, despite its comic turns, is not for the faint of heart.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nobody's interested when apprentice stripper Teresa Johnson gets stabbed and mutilated in her West Side apartment a month after V-E Day. But her mentor Rhonda Silverstar, who knows Teresa (or Tush) as a sweet kid who ``spent her days poking around museums,'' is determined to bag her killer. Rhonda herself is kinda sweet too, a foolish-wise fallen princess devoted to her art--she gets fired from Plotsky's Burlesque for doing something nasty when she gets carried away by passion--and her tale isn't so much a detective story (there's only one clue) as a saccharine picaresque (taking Rhonda to Tush's home in Valleyview, Ohio, then to her well-connected Uncle Mo in L.A., before returning her to Brooklyn and Newark) framed by homicide. Warning: Rhonda's always wrong about men--her boyfriends, songwriter Sandy Singer and center-fielder Bull Wallinsky; Valleyview editor Calvin Bryant; even Uncle Mo--so, as Cal tells her, ``trust nobody.'' Ritz (Family Blood, 1992, etc.) stuffs this poorly paced saga with so many overripe period markers that it reads like a commercial for 1945. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.