Looking for the Aardvark

Denver antiques dealer Jason Lynx found out more than he cared to know about his parentage in Death for Old Times' Sake , but in other respects he's still the same: a timid soul, enamored of a lady cop with a raging metabolism, who gets drawn into murder with indecent regularity. Readers of Grass , a provoking piece of SF world-building and feminist speculation by Sheri S. Tepper, will likely be disappointed in the predictable mysteries she writes under the pseudonym Orde. Lynx goes to the pueblo lands near Santa Fe, N.Mex., after a friend's less-than-likeable evangelist brother Ernie is found with his throat sliced open. Rounding up suspects isn't strenuous work: Ernie managed to disrupt weddings, shopping-mall traffic and several lives by preaching his personal good word to a hostile world. His death leaves his pretty wife free to pursue dreams of painting, his daughter free to return to her mother, a family of deadbeats free to squat on his land and two good old Oklahoma boys named Boomer and Buster free of one more enemy. Few of the red herrings will mask the predictable identity of the killer. Lynx should have stayed home, romancing his cop, moping around and letting others run his antiques business. ( July )