The Street Where She Lived

TV newswriter, espresso addict and all-around failure in matters of love, Greenwich Village's Michael Carpo is a likable guy in a sad-sack kind of way. So it's a shame that the solution to the puzzle in this second book in Miano's series (Flesh and Stone, 1997) will strike even lazy readers before the halfway mark. Carpo hears screams in the night and runs out to find a woman sobbing in the street. Irene Foster has found the body of her friend Cheryl Street, apparently the latest victim of the Sandman, a serial killer who removes the brown eyes of his women victims. As Irene and Carpo become friendly, an inept pair of cops set a trap for the Sandman and get Carpo in trouble. While investigating his dead neighbor's life, Carpo learns about an elusive boyfriend and unearths a series of troubling discrepancies between Cheryl's murder and the others attributed to the Sandman. Although his professional life takes a turn for the worse, Carpo's love life looks up, at least for a while. Miano lays out some tangled plot lines here, but he also leaves his clues in plain sight, lessening his story's impact. (Mar.)