The Fourth Steven

Romantic, free-spirited Honey Huckleberry chooses to isolate herself in the eccentrically designed home of her elderly parents, dead these many years. The strange young woman is already acquainted with three men named Steven when she picks up the phone on an apparently wrong number and a new Steven threatens to kill her. Undeterred, Honey, a publishers' sales rep, continues on her scheduled rounds of Gulf coast bookstores and tells Janie, a bookstore owner who may like a good mystery but loves the idea of an actual case. Honey is a vague, trailing sort that, strangely, every man finds irresistible, and the plot meanders, fueled in part by Janie's off-the-wall contributions. Despite this, Honey's first-person narrative can be fascinating because Moseley (Bonita Faye) is a good stylist with a fine sense of atmosphere, not only for locales like South Padre Island, but also for the aura of fear. (Aug.)