Deadline for a Critic

Kienzle's reputation has grown with the success of eight bestsellers about Detroit priest Father Koesler. (The first, The Rosary Murders, is due for release as a movie.) Catalyst in the ninth is the sudden death of a vicious critic, Ridley Groendal. His longtime homosexual lover, Peter Harison, testifies that Groendal died after a huge dinner, which taxed his weak heart, but Koesler suspects murder. He questions several people who grew up with him and the dead man, including their former mates at the seminary where Groendal abruptly gave up studying for the priesthood. Koesler's investigation discloses the motives for the critic's malicious attacks on innocent victims, whom he blamed for his own failures. As the priest talks to men and women whose lives and careers Groendal had ruined, the shocks proliferate. The strongest occurs in the final, unforeseen disclosure. Kienzle's ninth may be hailed as his most complex and finest mystery. (April 13)