WILLIAM BEECHCROFT – Secret Kills. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1988. No paperback edition.

   William Beechcroft’s fifth suspense novel is Secret Kills, featuring Dan Forrest, reporter for New York tabloid NewsLeak, a publication which is certainly no better than it has to be. Forrest, whom we’ve met before (in Chain of Vengeance), is here interested in the death of actress Marguerite Falconer.

   The official police verdict, seemingly dictated from on high, is death by autoerotic asphyxia. This is not consistent with what Forrest learns of Falconer’s character, and the trail leads to Washington, to Edwin Stanfield at the Department of State, whose daughter has just been badly damaged in a subway bombing.

   Dan, in unlikely harness with NewsLeak’s rotund society reporter, Corky Brion, starts poking about in a pile of corruption which surely includes one more death, likely his. A pleasant diversion.

BEECHCROFT, WILLIAM. Pseudonym of William F. Hallstead, 1924- . [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]

    Position of Ultimate Trust. Dodd, 1981.
    Image of Evil. Dodd, 1985.

    Chain of Vengeance. Dodd, 1986. [Dan Forrest]
    The Rebuilt Man. Dodd, 1987.

    Secret Kills. Dodd, 1988. [Dan Forrest]
    Pursuit of Fear. Carroll & Graf, 1990.