These Bones Were Made for Dancing

Both Broadway and Wall Street snap to life in this sixth Smith and Wetzon mystery (after Murder: The Musical). Leslie Wetzon, a former dancer who is now partner of an executive headhunting firm with the elegant Xenia Smith, is drawn into a murder mystery that's at least 15 years old when a skeleton with a bullet through its skull turns up in a Greenwich Village brownstone. At the same time, Wetzon and an old friend are collaborating on a two-day charity revival of an 18-year-old musical, for which they're recruiting the original cast and crew. One cast member, dancer Terri Matthews, once a close friend of Wetzon's, can't be located. Is the skeleton what's left of Terri? Wetzon and her lover, NYPD detective Silvestri, try to find out. The suspects, most of them associated with the original musical, are a wonderfully drawn, backbiting, jealous and vindictive lot-and Terri, despite her farm-fresh image, turns out to have been an egregious vamp. Meyers plunges Wetzon into a frenetic routine of rehearsing, recruiting and sleuthing, as NYC at holiday time provides an electric background for a lively, gleefully bitchy whodunit. (Sept.)