A Gift for Murder

Peggy O'Neill is a campus cop with a wittily sarcastic voice and a talent for stumbling onto murder victims. The members of the Tower Writers' Collective are famous and semi-famous writers who conflict with one another over both literary and personal matters. When Cameron Harris is found propped up in a closet with a chapter of his latest manuscript--a roman a clef with digs in it about every literary figure in town--on his lap, the collective's members are prime suspects. Lake ( Poisoned Ivy ) uses the setting to make tongue-in-cheek and self-referential jokes about the literary scene. A wispy poetess ends one reading with a poem about the penis being an underdeveloped vagina, and at a dinner party another author suggests that a female campus police officer ``would be an interesting subject for a novel, or at least a story.'' O'Neill's romantic involvement with one of the collective's members is an effective device, since it explains her presence at the scene of the crime and gives her access to the group, but Lake does not explore the relationship and ties it up too neatly when O'Neill's suitor decides to go live in South America. When he promises to write, the familiar phrase takes on a sinister cast. (Dec.)