The Pathology of Lies

Gloria Greene is 27, beautiful and ambitious--perhaps murderously so. When the head of San Francisco's Portfolio magazine is murdered (his body cut into pieces and mailed to subscribers throughout the country), Greene, the food editor who knows nothing about food, is promoted simultaneously to chief editor and suspect. The alleged ""Bulk Mail Butcher"" openly enjoys and exploits her notoriety, using her murder-suspect status to catapult herself into front-page celebrity. She humiliates the FBI and the entire magazine industry with her scandalous and paradoxical public prancing, announcing that she is ""too guilty to be anything but free."" Greene is outrageously narcissistic, extolling incest as the closest thing to self-love (""We taste each other. In each other we taste ourselves,"" she says of her ongoing affair with her father). There's a good deal here (including Greene's cold-blooded treatment of an employee just diagnosed HIV positive) that may offend, but first-time novelist Keats puts his real-life magazine experience (at SOMA and, currently, San Francisco magazine) to good use in fashioning this shrewd satire. Though his main character is very much a woman written by a man, Gloria is humorously exaggerated, both as a comic-book sexpot and murderous enfant terrible. And it is this wit that makes the tale as entertaining, glib and smug as it is. Keats's work here doesn't fulfill its overt, if improbable, Dostoyevskian aspirations, but it does succeed at being slick and sassy. (May)