KAT SCRATCH FEVER

When Sacramento lawyer James Randolph kills himself just in time for the Christmas holiday, Richard Carter, the law partner who hired Kat Colorado to check up on Randolph and see what was bothering him (a typical assignment for Kat), is certain that only some personal disaster would've made him pull the trigger, so he gives Kat a blank check to go on with the case. Luckily for Kat, she's soon hired a second time on what turns out to be the same case, doubling her take while focusing her inquiry. The second client, prim, elderly, matter-of-fact Madeline Hunter, serves on the board of Hope For Kids, a local foundation Randolph had donated generously to. As Kat soon finds out, Madeline's being blackmailed by somebody who demanded she donate $100,000 to Hope For Kids. It doesn't take long for Kat, armed with her usual combination of charm, persistence, and bluff, to discover the shameful secret in Randolph's past—and to establish that an awful lot of Hope For Kids's funding seems to have been accrued in response to the blackmailer's solicitations. But no matter how sure Kat is about the blackmailer's identity, and no matter how many victims she identifies, none of them is willing to risk exposure to testify against this civic-minded monster, who meantime has succeeded in getting to Kat's best buds: her advice- columnist friend Charity, obnoxious reporter J.O. Edwards, even Lindy, the street girl she's rescued. Kat's more successful as therapist than detective in her eighth (Honky Tonk Kat, 1996, etc.); the telling is long-winded, the culprit obvious, and the Christmas motif pounded home without mercy. Ho-ho-ho. (Author tour)