Coffee Time Reader

Clark's huge following, presumably drawn by her trick of presenting female nightmares with the greatest measure of cozy reassurance - no explicit sex or violence, no threatening moral complexity, killers with the minds of arrested children - will probably eat up this year's model: the most wholesome tale of murder through the personal ads you're ever likely to see. Fifteen years ago, a neurotic Connecticut high-school misfit named Charley strangled pretty, outgoing Nan Sheridan when she spurned his birthday gift of a pair of dancing shoes. Now somebody in New York is luring women through personal ads, strangling them, and burying them with a dancing slipper replacing one shoe; and when aspiring interior decorator Darcy Scott, who's been answering personal ads to help her friend Nona Roberts with a TV show on the subject, gets a box containing a dancing slipper and one of her dead friend Erin Kelley's shoes, she realizes that Erin, who'd been killed by a Charles North she met through the personals, is the seventh such victim in the past two years. Are the killings the work of a copycat like Erin's felonious jeweler colleague Jay Stratton or her lecherous building-super Gus Boxer - or her blind dates double-dealing broker-illustrator Doug Fields or whiny Professor Len Parker, actually an NYU maintenance man? Or is Charley back in business again? With the help of FBI agent Vince D'Ambrosio, psychiatrist-author Michael Nash (who's writing a book on personal ads), and Nan Sheridan's twin Chris, Darcy will get rescued in the nick of time - but not before some revelations of motive and coincidence that will tax Clark's most devoted fans and some monumentally heavy breathing that won't threaten even the most paranoid reader. Thrills as domestically reliable as Wonder Bread or Ivory Soap - but, like them, this is mostly air. (Kirkus Reviews)