Trust Me on This

Versatile Westlake delivers another offbeat story about picaresque types in his inimitably satiric, irresistible style. The action jets forward from the minute Sara Joslyn notices a corpse on the way to her new job as a reporter for the Weekly Galaxy in Florida. Naively, Sara congratulates herself on writing a big story right away but is quickly disillusioned. Her editor ignores the scoop, ordering Sara to concentrate on drumming up flaky features, the pseudo-newspaper's reason for being. The place is a madhouse with the staff competing with one another to contribute lurid, sleazy ""articles.'' Catching on, Sara becomes as adept as shameless ``Boy'' Cartwright, tough Ida Gavin and the rest of the reportorial roster. After scoring a coup with a phony piece about 100-year-old twins, Sara gets a prize assignment. With her young editor Jack Ingersoll and other reporters, she travels to Martha's Vineyard, using every ploy to crash the securely guarded wedding party of a TV star. When luck saves her several times from mysterious gunshots, Sara remembers the victim she saw on her first working day and realizes why someone wants her dead, too. This is a boffo performance, the tone set in Westlake's foreword. Disclaiming the existence of any newspaper like the Galaxy, he states, his tongue firmly in cheek, that a factual equivalent would involve people ``even more lost to all considerations of truth, taste . . . or any shred of common humanity.'' (May)