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Summary: Take one dead rock & roll star, his Courtney Love-type widow, themysterious deaths of his former bandmates, and the lost tracks of a comebackalbum. Stir in Jack Tagger, a middle-aged investigative reporter obsessed withdeath since his banishment to the obit desk; a fetching young editor with a yenfor our hero; and a boss looking for a reason to fire him. Put them in the handsof a master like Carl Hiaasen, who adds his trademark flourishes (who else woulduse a frozen lizard as a weapon?) to a creaky plot like this one, and the resultis a winner. Florida is full of caper writers with journalistic credentials, andplenty of them have a deft hand with quirky characters, but no one in the genreis better than Hiaasen. --Jane Adams