Cry Vengeance

A melodramatic story line and an improbably evil villain fail to deliver on the initial promise of the intriguing plot device of women banding together to punish sex criminals who slip through the justice system due to police indifference or the unwillingness of their victims to testify. Jessica Mitchell, rookie reporter for the same Minneapolis television station depicted in Handberg's Savage Justice , discovers while investigating the death of a man pulled from the Mississippi River that his murder is linked to several earlier cases: all involved men with sex crimes in their pasts and all took place in the same week as an annual feminist ``Take Back the Night'' rally. A tough female prosecutor and an even tougher female cop seem intent on steering Jessica away from the story, but with the help of burnt-out detective Matt Meecham and her lover, lawyer Jack Tomlinson, Jessica begins to tie these women and others to the murders. Then her younger sister appears on her doorstep, the victim of date rape and a traumatic abortion. A violent and unlikely ending to all these developments does little to make them credible. (Oct. )