Jigsaw: A Carroll Quint Mystery

Kennealy's breezy first in a new mystery series introduces San Francisco entertainment critic Carroll Quint, whose enemies include far more malevolent people than the movie actors incensed by his negative reviews. A serial killer calling himself Thanatos (the Greek personification of death) e-mails Carroll clues with an Alfred Hitchcock angle. Soon, aging movie star Montgomery Hines, an acquaintance of Carroll's and his one-time starlet mother, suffers a fate lifted from Psycho . After another cryptic e-mail from Thanatos, Carroll gets an urgent call from screenwriter Charlie Leeder, only to later find his corpse being picked clean by birds. Carroll's connections to the victims make him a suspect in the eyes of the police, and he begins to sense he's also tumbled into a Hitchcock plot. Kennealy (The Other Eye ) infuses even high stakes moments with a sense of lighthearted fun, and the plot is trickier to puzzle out than one might expect. (Apr.)