A Common Death

Coolly efficient Willow King leads a double life. From Tuesday through Thursday, she's a bespectacled civil servant at London's Department of Old Age Pensions. For the rest of the week, she's the chic, immensely successful romance novelist Cressida Woodruffe (complete with lover). But as quickly as the minister in charge of DOAP is dispatched with a few blows to the head, and before the culprit has been apprehended (largely through Willow's own efforts), her orderly existence and prized self-sufficiency, painstakingly earned and protected, come perilously close to an end. In order to guard her secrets, Willow eschews police protection and sets off to find Algernon Endelsham's killer before she herself can be unmasked. Her belief in her invulnerability is shaken first by a threat of violence, then by vandalism of her flat. Sexual passion further erodes the barricades, leaving her unsure for the first time in her life. Willow is formidable and off-putting; her alter ego Cressida is no less remote. Thus the psychological metamorphosis in this otherwise mild mystery becomes pleasurably captivating. British and a recipient of the Tony Godwin Award, the pseudonymous Cooper has published three books under her own name, Daphne Wright. This is her first mystery. (Jan.)