Murder on Theatre Row: A Bill Donovan Mystery - Hardcover

Do all police departments have special divisions devoted to "weird suspects and exotic weapons?" Apparently the NYPD of Michael Jahn's imagination does, for weird and exotic is what Captain Bill Donovan specializes in. In Murder on Theatre Row Donovan is confronted with murder-by-crossbow at a performance of "Casablanca: The Musical." In the course of solving this peculiar crime, Donovan will run across a dead vaudevillian, an alcoholic critic and an English Impresario with a taste in musicals so bad as to rival that of Zero Mostel's character in The Producers.

Okay, so the plot's outrageous and the investigative methods a mite shaky. Still, anyone who loves show business will enjoy this ride through the backstage world of Times Square accompanied by the quirky characters Jahn scatters liberally throughout his story.

The damage from a broken water main does more than wreak havoc in Midtown Manhattan--it uncovers the grave of Milos Tryvomanic, a.k.a. Milos the Magnificent, a vaudeville crossbow- shooter who's been reposing, along with the tools of his trade, in a sub-basement of the Old Knickerbocker Theater since 1933. Now an inoffensive Vietnamese ‚migr‚ is dead, someone has stolen Milos's crossbow and arrows, and it's open season on the habitu‚s of the Old Knick--especially on megalomaniac producer Sir John Victor Holland, who's rushing to renovate the aging theater for his latest premiere, reclaiming it from its present squalor to make it a worthy neighbor for Times Square's Disney and Gap outlets. The theater's riddled with suspects who either hate Holland (the music critic whose lyrics he swiped, the disgruntled London leading lady he dumped for a wispy, collagen-enhanced Hollywood star) or who squirm in distaste at the very thought of his new production, Casablanca: The Musical. Enter Capt. Bill Donovan, NYPD, who, though no fan of Holland's, will nab the well-nigh invisible killer in time to save the theater and celebrate his nuptials under the most unexpected circumstances. Jahn (Murder at the Museum of Natural History, 1994, etc.) supplies reams of eye-opening historical detail (factual) and suitably bitchy chitchat (barely fictional) in lieu of a more arresting puzzle. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.