The Nimby Factor

Elias ``Hack'' Hackshaw makes a welcome return (after The Twenty-Acre Plot ) in a droll adventure again set in the wilds of upstate New York. The plot involves murder, low-rent journalism, Hack's second career in home improvement and assorted romantic complications. In the midst of the brouhaha over a proposed landfill (with many residents vowing Not In My Backyard), Hack wins restoration rights to a dilapidated Victorian mansion. After angering the anti-landfill contingent with an editorial supporting the project (which, not so incidentally, secures his claim to the house), Hack discovers the body of the leader of the anti-landfill group in the mansion foyer. Aware of his likely status as murder suspect, Hack keeps quiet about the corpse. Then the body vanishes and a few more turn up. Hack must keep a step ahead of both the police and a lusty college intern at the paper named Fawn as he pursues a well-heeled lady connected with the house preservation society. Despite the frenzied plotting at the end, Wilcox, who also writes the T.S.W. Sheridan mysteries, nicely balances the laughs and the narrative tension. (Dec.)