Lady Left

Can Hollywood's rich and famous find hap­piness in the Third World—or will they find only murder? That's the question that blues-playing police lieutenant Nicky Rachmaninoff must answer in Robert Westbrook's third book in The Left-Handed Policeman series, Lady Left.

Having exposed the Hollywood dream ma­chine and the world of rock and roll in his previous two mysteries, Robert Westbrook now gives the same delightfully satirical treat­ment to another hot topic on the Hollywood scene: fashionable leftist politics. Nicky Rach­maninoff must take on Tinsel Town's liberal elite as it involves itself in a wild scheme to make the hemisphere safe for romance, revo­lution, and beautiful people everywhere.

A reluctant Nicky is persuaded to "vacation" in Nicaragua by his loving ex-wife, Susan Merril, who is determined to shed her glamour-girl image by becoming a leftist activist. The vaca­tion goes wrong from the start: Nicky's feisty Bev­erly Hills daughter, fourteen-year-old Tanya, falls madly in love with a Nicaraguan soldier; and a far-left Hollywood professor, Cory Heard, introduces Nicky to a complicated scam that maybe—just maybe—is intended to bring the Sandinistas hack into power.

But when Cory Heard is apparently mur­dered at the site of the late dictator Somoza’s buried treasure, Nicky must put down his margarita in favor of a gun and mineral water, as he uncovers a trail that leads him back to Bev­erly Hills—and into the arms of Cory's activist wife, the film superstar Katherine Hall. She is dark, passionate, devious, and out for Nicky, one way or another; she is the alluring and dangerous Lady Left.

Nothing in Hollywood or the Third World is what it seems. From the jungles of Nicara­gua to the elegant homes of Beverly Hills and the palatial desert estates of Palm Springs, Lady Left is a darkly comic, intricate, and suspenseful story of what happens when glamour, murder, and politics mix.