After the mutilated body of a woman is found addressed to Lt. Justin Savile V and Police Chief Cuddy R. Mangum, the two men must wade through politics, American aristocrats and back alleys to find the killer before he hunts again. Penzler Pick, July 2001: One of the greatest disappointments for a mystery aficionado is to find an author or a series detective that you absolutely adore, only to have the author disappear or the character be killed off. Conan Doyle tried to do it to Sherlock Holmes, throwing him off the edge of the Reichenbach Falls (happily to resurrect him some years later), and Nicholas Freeling did it to Inspector Van Der Valk, permanently alienating his readers. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo planned 10 books about Martin Beck, and within days of completing the 10th adventure of the Swedish policeman, Wahloo died, ensuring no further books in the series. Not quite so dramatically, Michael Malone apparently fell off the face of the earth. (He became a highly successful television writer, which is almost the same thing.) Today, even some sophisticated readers of mystery fiction have forgotten Malone, who wrote two masterpieces involving a pair of detectives in a small town in North Carolina, Justin Savile and Cuddy Mangum: Uncivil Seasons , one of the few nearly perfect novels in the history of detective fiction, published in 1983; and Time's Witness , in 1989. Unlike too many cops portrayed in detective fiction as stupid, corrupt, or both, Justin and Cuddy are fully developed as intelligent, honest cops who try to do their jobs as well as possible, even though they have their human flaws. Cuddy is arrogant and impatient; Justin drinks too much and likes the ladies a bit more than he should, seeing how he's married (just barely now, as his wife has moved out of the house). First Lady is the first volume about these terrific characters in more than decade. Thankfully, Malone's publisher is also releasing the first two books in trade paperback editions, which I can recommend as strongly as anything I've praised in Amazon.com's pages. Very little is as it seems in this poetically written mystery novel. A serial killer seems to be on the loose, but is he really a serial killer? Justin discovers a pattern that seems brilliantly thought out and then, as in E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case , holes are punched through the theory by various members of the law enforcement community (including, in this case, two women from the FBI). First Lady is utterly contemporary, with some gruesomely described violence and a healthy dose of (very discreet) sex, but it's also a wonderfully constructed old-fashioned puzzler, with a cornucopia of clever clues, a near-surplus of suspicious suspects, and a boatful of red herrings guaranteed to fool the most assiduous armchair detective. Welcome back, Mr. Malone. And don't make us wait another dozen years for the next Justin and Cuddy novel! --Otto Penzler With this very personal police procedural, rife with local color and memorable characters, Malone resurrects two North Carolina police detectives from Time's Witness (1989). Hillston, NC, chief of police Cuddy Mangum and Justin Savile, head of the department's homicide division, are men besieged. The trial of a local university professor accused of murdering his wife is making its way slowly through the judicial system, and the Hillston police are taking heat because of tampered evidence, sensational media coverage, and enraged public opinion. Meanwhile, an unidentified murder victim has puzzled Cuddy and Justin for far too long, and city officials are demanding a quick resolution or quicker resignations. Pending elections, a political sex scandal, bad behavior of a visiting rock star, and Cuddy and Justin's own personal devils add to the pressure. Then second and third deaths point to the likelihood of a serial murderer. If the murderer is too easily identified and some of the clues go unexplained, the reader will still relish this page-turner for the entertainment it provides. Recommended for public libraries. Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Devoted readers of Malone's two previous Cuddy Mangum-Justin Savile mysteries, as well as his mainstream fiction, including the superb Handling Sin (1986), have been waiting impatiently for 10 long years for a new novel from this masterful storyteller. Malone's hiatus from fiction writing, which, improbably, included an Emmy-winning stint as head writer for the soap One Life to Live , is finally over. His third mystery starring Mangum, the homespun Hillston, North Carolina, police chief, and Savile, his blueblood lieutenant, proves well worth the wait. Riding high from a wave of national press about his innovative crime fighting, Mangum seems ready for a fall. A serial killer appears to be on the loose in Hillston--body parts from one of his victims have been addressed to Cuddy and Justin--a