Beauty Dies

Although her protagonists are outwardly tough career women, Howe's (The Mother Shadow) heroines claim a distinctive view of femininity in this often arch, half-baked mystery. Maggie Hill, narrator and self-deprecating assistant to high-toned sleuth Claire Conrad, sees beauty as true power and lusts for Conrad's macho butler, Boulton. She's the perfect misogynist to help solve this whodunit, which makes a three-point turn on the suspicious suicide of a former model, a hooker's insistence that the death was murder and a pornographic videotape of the model's gorgeous daughter. Hill roots out suspects at Manhattan strip joints and a glossy fashion magazine, but she leaves the finer points of detective work to her boss, who rolls to crime scenes in a chauffeur-driven Bentley and never gets her gloved hands dirty. Neither of her investigators will inspire much reader sympathy; no more engaging is the plot, whose resolution hinges on evidence offered by an insane woman Hill encounters in a flophouse. Only readers amused by elitists slumming in the city's underbelly are likely to be entertained. (Oct.)