Do or Die

Grace Edwards's Mali Anderson series (If I Should Die, A Toast Before Dying, No Time to Die) takes readers on a veritable walking tour of Harlem's institutions and inhabitants. This time out, Mali, a former cop, strolls off a QE2 jazz cruise and straight into murder. Her jazz musician father's pianist, Ozzie Hendrix, has returned from a gig in Newport to find his daughter Starr, a budding singer trying to recover from a heroin addiction, with her throat slashed. With friends and family devastated, Mali's method of detection is anything but by the book, much to the dismay of her boyfriend, detective Tad Honeywell. Her best informers are a slew of Harlem beauticians:

Bertha, my 20-year friend, owns Bertha's Beauty Salon and is a reliable source of street news, gossip, and any scandal worth repeating. She has been on the same location on Eighth Avenue years before it was renamed for Frederick Douglass, and she doesn't have to poke her head out the door to catch a whisper. It flows in automatically as early as 7 a.m., when the regulars from Miss Laura's luncheonette arrive with breakfast and news hotter than grits.

Rumor has it that Starr's death was a brutal payback for her efforts to distance herself from Short Change, her one-time pimp and supplier. But when Short Change is gunned down and the prints of Travis Morgan, a prominent Harlem businessman, turn up on the knife that killed Starr, respectable and not-so-respectable worlds start colliding--and the clash will have Mali fighting for her life.

Edwards's novels tend to be more successful as social history than as mystery. A jumble of characters and incidents muddies the plot, but the author's carefully rendered portrait of Harlem's streets and language carries an unmistakable glow of authenticity. --Kelly Flynn