No Rest for the Dead

Twenty-six of the best-known names in the business%E2%80%94including Jeffery Deaver, Faye Kellerman, Alexander McCall Smith, Kathy Reichs, Thomas H. Cook, and Lisa Scottoline%E2%80%94contribute chapters to this modestly entertaining "who-really-done-it." In 2000, museum curator Rosemary Thomas is executed in California for the murder of her philandering curator husband, whose decomposing corpse was found in an iron maiden shipped from the U.S. to Germany. Police detective Jon Nunn helped convict Thomas, but a decade later he's sure of her innocence and sets out to catch the real culprit by using her request for a memorial service as an opportunity to convene a roster of alternate suspects with a slew of motives. While many readers will enjoy the inventive changes of plot direction and seeing how the next author will deal with them, others may feel a similarity of tone and style is less a sign of creative minds in sync than of bland homogenization. (July)