At Risk

Historical romance veteran French's first contemporary romantic suspense novel ably evokes an appealing locale, then bogs down in cliche and contrivance. In coastal Delaware, a serial killer who calls himself the Game Master has been stashing his victims' bones in underwater crab traps. Soon after he murders a student of Dr. Elizabeth Clarke in her office at upscale Somerville College, Lizzy begins to receive ominous phone calls, ""gifts"" of funeral wreaths and dead animals, and visits from a marauder who steals nothing, yet makes his presence inside her home known. Lizzy is suspicious of three people-a smarmy grad student, the security expert who's her best friend and her ex-boyfriend, the ex-con Jack Rafferty. As Jack and Lizzy reunite for both romance and detection, neither emerges as a coherent character. The Game Master, too, comes across as a grab bag of standard pop-culture serial-killer symptoms rather than a convincing figure. French (The Conqueror) never resolves his contradictions nor the many holes in her plot, such as how a well-known man can target, travel and kill so widely without arousing comment from a community depicted as small, gossipy and close-knit. Agent, Evan Marshall.