Digging Up Death

Centering on an archeological dig in the middle of Wall Street, Stein's second mystery featuring New York City magazine reporter Kay Engles (after Murder at the Class Reunion, 1993) gets off to a slow start and never perks up. Kate's longtime friend Vera Contas, an ambitious archeologist working to preserve New York City landmarks, hopes to make her reputation by answering a question posed by the Wall Street site: Did Captain Kidd bury a treasure in the very ground on which a skyscraper is to be built? Kay gets permission from her editor to follow the intriguing story. Then her car is vandalized, someone takes a shot at Vera and a young construction worker is found dead at the site. Kay is drawn in further when she begins a romantic liaison with Alan Elkan, the idealistic young real estate developer who's waiting to build on the site Vera is excavating. When Alan himself is murdered, Kay is filled with indecision: Will her job as a reporter conflict with her loyalty to Vera, who is now a suspect? Kay's ambivalence is mirrored in the story itself, which can't decide if it is to be a treasure hunt, a murder mystery or a romance--there's even a subplot about Kay's search for her birth mother. (July)