Dead Letter - Softcover

There's no record of Jane Waterhouse ever writing a romance novel, but she certainly knows enough about the subject to pull it off. In Dead Letter, true crime writer Garner Quinn tells us about the last time she saw the strange and possibly dangerous sculptor Dane Blackmoor a year ago: "If I closed my eyes and held my breath, I could still remember the slow, soft progression of his mouth along the underside of my jaw, upward to my ear, how he'd whispered his parting shots in a hoarse, raspy voice."

In fact, what makes Waterhouse's books about Quinn so much fun to read is that neither the author nor her main character seem to know when to quit. You'd think that after being subjected to so much terror and personal humiliation in Graven Images and Shadow Walk, Quinn would listen to all those people who constantly urge her to (1) rethink her dangerous line of work, wherein every new book proposal turns into a death-defying situation and (2) give up on Blackmoor, who dumped her in her first outing. But, no--Dead Letter begins with Garner desperately scanning the mail in her New Jersey coastal home for word from Blackmoor and finding instead the first of a series of nasty threats from an obsessed fan. Things get so dangerous that a top security expert named Reed Corbin is called in, and for a while it appears that this fascinating hunk will solve both of Quinn's problems. The wily Waterhouse, however, has other surprising and satisfying solutions up her well-knit sleeve. --Dick Adler

``Not everything in this world is about Garner Quinn,'' her housekeeper's daughter Mercedes Fields tells her. It's a lesson that seems to be lost on Garner's author, who's made the bestselling true-crime writer a target of a demented correspondent whose devotion soon turns to murderous hatred. Hiring Reed Corbin's high-priced security firm to protect her, Garner retreats with her daughter to the Jersey shore, but the man who calls himself ``Chaz'' just keeps on cominguntil he runs into a trap and lands in jail. Time for a celebration, crows Corbin, bodyguard to the stars, who by this time has fallen for the woman he's professionally bound to protect. So he spirits her off to a party to launch his new book, The Fear Factor, where she smugly watches videotaped tributes from Madonna and Tom Cruise to ``the man I'm going to sleep with tonight.'' Instead of sleeping with her, though, Corbin gets blown to pieces by a bomb that his surviving partner, Matt Raice, insists was set by a terrorist cabal that had nothing to do with Garner. Only after a trip to Pariswhere her distant lover, sculptor Dane Blackmoor, is willing to drop everything for Garner's sakea second encounter with providentially freed Chaz, and a memorable finale among the Thanksgiving para de balloons, will Garner realize that the whole ado is about her, and has been from the beginning. Like Garner's first two adventures (Graven Images, 1995; Shadow Walk, 1997), this one is suspenseful stuff but undiluted by a hint of any character whose l ife doesn't revolve around its heroine, surely the most self-involved true-crime writer around. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.