An Accidental Murder: Death on Fireplace Road

The car crash on Long Island in 1956 that killed artist Jackson Pollock—which his lover, Ruth Kligman, survived, but Ruth’s roommate, Edith Metzger, did not—propels Harrison’s enjoyable sequel to An Exquisite Corpse. Unlike in real life, an autopsy shows that Edith was strangled before her body was put in the car. Fortunately for local patrolman Earl Finch, two NYPD officers, Capt. Brian “Fitz” Fitzgerald and his wife, Det. Juanita “Nita” Diaz, are vacationing in the East Hampton hamlet of Springs. Fitz and Nita happily rub shoulders and share drinks with bemused artistic luminaries and speculate a good deal as to who the killer might be, but the charming couple do little detective work. Indeed, chance leads to the apprehension of the culprit. The juicy period gossip and the lively characterizations of the artists and their entourages more than compensate for the paper-thin mystery. Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, knows her history and what the Hamptons were like when living there was cheap. (Aug.)