cover image Blood on the Street

Blood on the Street

Annette Meyers. Doubleday Books, $18.5 (340pp) ISBN 978-0-385-42376-2

In a fourth adventure for this pair of Wall Street headhunters (after The Deadliest Option ), gorgeous, abrasive, opportunistic Xenia Smith and weepy ex-Broadway dancer Leslie Wetzon become entangled in another murder. After Brian Middleton, a stockbroker for whom they recently found a new job, turns up dead in Central Park, they discover he was having an affair with 16-year-old Tabby Ann, whose mother he once bilked. Her mother asks Smith and Wetzon to find the missing Tabby, whose pig-latin OK as is diary may hold a clue to Brian's murder. When the diary disappears and Tabby's body reappears at the bottom of a pool outside the Vivian Beaumont TheatreTheatre per book , the partners get serious about their investigation. Wall Street jargon, a romance for Wetzon and a 40th birthday for Smith can't disguise the fact that the protagonists look and sound more like cartoon characters than like real working women. ( June )