Susan Given (introduced in Given the Crime) is the Chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Her motto is “crime never sleeps.” She is stressed by the demands of work and home and suffering from nightmares induced by an incident in the previous book. (There are a number of references to earlier incidents.) She is barely able to keep up with her casework. Her obnoxious estranged husband (why did she ever marry this jerk?) is blocking a divorce and making life as difficult as possible. Her two adopted daughters are acting like typical preteens. She learns from her mother that her childhood best friend has left her husband for a lesbian lover. She has been assigned a high-profile bank fraud case. A supervisor is giving her grief. A serial killer nicknamed “Rice Krispies” (“cereal killer”– get it?) is killing beautiful joggers in Central Park and mutilating them. The print and TV journalists are after her for sound-bytes.

It is no wonder the woman is stressed.

Susan is advised to seek the help of a therapist, who recommends she take a vacation. In fact, Susan’s co-workers and family are recommending a vacation. When her would-be-ex takes the girls for two weeks, Susan flies to St. Stephen’s in the Caribbean. There she quickly meets Ascension, a local who has business and family connections to nearly everyone on the island. She also meets Colette Cooke, a former Playmate of the Year, now an actress with prominent physical assets, who is staying at the same hotel with others on a movie shoot (and who is married to one of the principals in the bank fraud case).

Vacation on St. Stephen’s is hardly a rest cure. Among other things, Susan has a energetic evening at Ascension’s home with his wife and eleven children, goes parasailing with some of Ascension’s relatives, falls into a tree, injures her ankle, becomes acquainted with the island’s principal drug dealer, gets shot at, discovers Ascension’s dead body, and spends a drunken evening with the local chief of police.

She returns home with even more nightmares and to find her TV-anchor-wannabe niece, recently arrived from Tennessee, “entertaining” a man in her apartment.

And so it goes. Crime never sleeps.

There are more connections between the bad guys in New York and the bad guys on St. Stephen’s. Everyone’s sleeping with someone for ambition or plain ol’ lust. Susan’s life gets more complicated on all fronts.

So what is the main plot? Well, maybe it is the bank fraud case with all its auxiliary subplots. But maybe it isn’t.

In the midst of all the mayhem and murder, there are occasional glimpses of humor. Some of the cast of players are more caricatures than fully developed characters. There is, however, simply too much going on, too much jumping from one plot to another and one character to another, to make this a satisfying story.

At the end, Susan gets yet another chip to add to her pile of stress. Readers are likely to feel pretty stressed, too.

--Lesley Dunlap