cover image A Clinic for Murder

A Clinic for Murder

Marsha Landreth. Walker & Company, $19.95 (212pp) ISBN 978-0-8027-3241-5

Readers who missed Dr. Sam Turner's debut in The Holiday Murders will have a hard time piecing together this sequel. Widowed for seven years, Samantha Turner is a Wyoming bison rancher and a medical examiner. Here she is also pregnant, unmarried and whiny. At a professional conference in San Diego, Dr. Doyle Smith collapses. Sam, rushing to his aid, hears him whisper ``murder'' and ``letter in safe'' before he dies. Checking out Smith's hotel room, Sam finds it has been ransacked. Soon she is arrested. Derek Turner, a CIA agent who is her late husband's son and also possibly the father of her child, turns up to spring her from jail and coax her into marriage. Sam continues her haphazard search into Smith's death, barely escaping a plane bombing on her return to Wyoming. A visit to Smith's widow in Denver is followed by a trip to a medical facility in the Caribbean which is linked to a bombed Los Angeles abortion clinic. The occasional inclusion of intriguing medical details fails to save this jumbled story, which relies way too heavily on circumstance. (Nov.)