One O'Clock Jump

Segueing neatly from the ski slopes of contemporary Wyoming (1999's Nordic Nights) to the Kansas City of Count Basie and FDR's fireside chats, McClendon debuts an excellent historical series, with evocative period dialogue and a story line full of surprises. Iris Jackson is a woman with a secret, but not for long. PI Dorie Lennox, hired to tail the meatpacker's ""bar girl,"" thinks her first solo job is over when Iris jumps into the Missouri River, but this is just the beginning. Background on Iris is hard to find; rummaging through her few belongings yields scant information. Frustrated, Dorie picks up the investigation her partner, a WWI vet suffering from mustard gas poisoning, was working on when he was hospitalized centered on the new racetrack outside Kansas City. With little to go on, Dorie follows what leads she has straight into a web of false identities, cover-ups and fraud. Everyone seems to have at least one secret the crooked lawyer who instructs her to pursue the trail, the meatpacker, the silent partners in the racetrack, even Dorie herself. Layers of lies, pretext and disguise must be peeled back to solve an old mystery before thugs succeed in doing more than simply beating her up. After a somewhat sluggish start, the pace accelerates rapidly, as Dorie moves from hospital to racetrack, to jazz clubs, wisecracking all the way. With a blurb praising Dorie's appeal from Sue Grafton, McClendon (author also of the Alix Thorssen series) seems well poised to make this new series a hit. (Mar. 13)