SUSPENSE

``I don't deal in danger,'' Stanley Hastings aptly tells his latest client. But Maxine Winnington, who obviously hasn't seen Stanley's rÇsumÇ, hires him anyway to identify the person who's been harassing her with anonymous threatening phone calls. If you expect to see unarmed slip-and-fall specialist Stanley take over as Maxine's bodyguard, think again: His approach to protection is to install Caller ID on her phone and wait to see who calls. Luckily for Stanley, Maxine and her husband, successful suspense novelist Kenneth P. Winnington, have just had their phone number changed to avoid the caller, and when the calls keep coming in, the field of suspects (Kenneth's agent, his editor, his publicist) is awfully narrow. Murder, of course, will winnow the suspects still further, and Stanley—whose name is on slips of paper clutched in the dead folks' hands—will end up in hot water with his nemesis Sgt. Thurman. So far, so appetizing to fans of this rollicking series (Scam, p. 258, etc.). But Stanley's all- too-pointed inquiries into the differences between mystery and suspense novels presage big trouble for the novel he's stuck in, despite his repeated insistence that ``it's not a book.'' The result is a cop-out and a cheat, a mixture of a whodunit with clues that ring hollow and a suspense novel with no suspense. In the words of several prophetic characters with more experience in publishing than Stanley: ``What a weak plot.''