cover image Deadline: A Novel of Mystery

Deadline: A Novel of Mystery

Marcy Heidish. St. Martin's Press, $16.95 (231pp) ISBN 978-0-312-06012-1

Written in headline- and bulletin-style present tense, this story about a journalist who must exhume secrets in her own life reads like a soap opera written at a newspaper copy desk. Residents of Washington, D.C., are appalled when a volunteer at a homeless women's shelter is found murdered in a grisly fashion, a steel-tipped umbrella jammed down her throat. Following up the story, crime reporter Nan Skillen goes undercover as a shelter volunteer. Nan receives silent phone calls and is stalked by a shadowy figure; two more shelter volunteers are murdered in the same way as the first victim. Meanwhile, Nan traces the silent phone calls to her father, a doctor who is in town to accept a humanitarian award but to whom she has not spoken in years. Under increasing pressure, Nan is forced to confront buried memories while she searches for the killer. Heidish's ( Miracles ) melodramatic plot is further hampered by staccato sentences that meld into a monotone. (June)