cover image Too Late to Be Good

Too Late to Be Good

Craig Jones. Ballantine Books, $3.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-345-32130-5

New York advertising executive Fay Colby, in her late 20s, so fears intimacy with men that she has invented a separate identity for herself as Ann Decker, a married woman with children, who limits her loving to two-hour trysts every few weeks or so with four different men. Fay tires of her divided life and begins therapy with a psychoanalyst. In the meantime, her father, who emotionally disowned her after her mother committed suicide years earlier, hires a private eye to follow Fay. Adding to the complications, one of ""Ann'' 's lovers learns about her real identity and starts to pester her. When two of the other lovers are brutally murdered, most of the characters in the novel are suspected by the private eye, who falls in love with Fay. Despite sometimes-stilted prose and occasionally incredible ingredients (the motivation of the murderer, for example), Jones has created an effective, fast-paced thriller that in the end resolves all its mysteries, psychological and otherwise. (February)