Murder on the Astral Plane (Hc)

In what appears to be a sly send-up of series protagonists, amateur sleuth Kate Jasper tells her psychic friend, Barbara Chu, that she fears she may be ""karmically impaired"" because whenever she joins a group of people, ""someone drops dead."" Barbara decides to convince Kate otherwise by luring her to a psychic soiree. But of course one of the blindfolded off-beat participants is surreptitiously garroted during an ""exercise in intuition."" Finding the killer in a group of psychics, visionaries and channelers would seem to be easy, but this doesn't turn out to be the case. Kate is flummoxed when her old adversary, Chief Wenger, arrives with an eager young lieutenant who is well read in the psychic arts and wants to use pop psychology to solve the crime. Wenger would prefer to pin the deed on Kate, Barbara or Kate's lover, Wayne, but he can't find enough evidence to support an arrest. Kate is reluctant to join in the investigation, but Barbara is determined to crack the case. As Barbara drags her to interview suspects, Kate tries to prevent Wayne, who is laid up in bed with pneumonia, from finding out that she's endangering her life yet again. Girdner's (When Death Hits the Fan, etc.) outlandish, droll sense of humor, filtered through narrator Kate's Alice-in-Wonderland na vet , eases the story along. Despite the hijinks and careful manipulation of reader suspicions, however, the plot develops too slowly to build proper suspense. (Apr.)