ANNETTE MEYERS – The Big Killing. Xenia Smith & Leslie Wetzon #1. Bantam, hardcover, 1989; paperback, 1990.

   For what it’s worth, this is the best story of murder on Wall Street since Emma Lathen seems to have stopped writing, and for all that, not that good. It’s also the first mystery to be tackled and solved by the executive headhunting team of Smith and Wetzon, both female.

   And apparently both rivals for the eye of police detective Silvestri, who really solves the case, sort of a split-screen affair, half dealing with missing tapes, half with a stash of stolen drugs. Unfortunately, the connection is that of only coincidence, merely a million-to-one shot, if you will.

PostScript:   And so Silvestri agrees, on page 348, which is maybe another indicator why I’d begun to lose interest long before. There are 350 pages in all, and that’s simply way too long for a mystery novel. It takes some pretty good characters to keep a good hold on a reader’s attention for that long, and sorry to say, Smith and Wetzon and their problems kept me involved for only 200 pages or so.

— Reprinted (and somewhat shortened) from Mystery*File #21, April 1990.