Ed O'Connor: The Year's Midnight

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Lucy Harrington, an Olympic athlete, is found dead. One of her blue eyes has been surgically removed; a poem has been written in blood on the bathroom wall.

Inspector John Underwood suspects he has a serial killer on his books. But he's going to have to turn literary sleuth to solve the crime. It doesn't take long to get from here to the poems of John Donne, evilly interpreted by a deranged man called Crowan Frayne.

Underwood has other problems: he's coughing blood, his wife is having an affair. He is racked with illness and a desire for revenge.

This is O'Connor's first book, and it's a good one. But it gets stuck on the flat passages on Donne's poetry where O'Connor stops telling a story and starts giving us a stage one English lecture.

Constable

$29.95