JOAN HESS – Strangled Prose. Claire Malloy #1. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1986. Ballantine, paperback: 1st printing thus, February 1987.
A reception for an author of romantic novels at Claire Malloy’s bookstore is destroyed when it is discovered that several characters in the lady’s latest epic have very close counterparts in real life. At the end of the gathering, the lady is dead. Lt. Rosen helps investigate.
The book is a lot of fun, perhaps too much so. The witty repartee us all but endless. Everyone is a master of it, and it (eventually) is overwhelming, In spite of the barbs, Claire and Rosen are attracted to each other, Big surprise.
— Reprinted from Mystery.File.3, February 1988.