Once again, single mother and struggling book agent Jane Stuart, her precocious 10-year son, Nicky, and Winky the cat are featured. These days, Jane alternates between bouts of tears for her departed husband and lust for unknown men (“Ooh, la la Sassoon” she says of a good-looking boarder at the local bed and breakfast) and begins dating -- surprise! -- the local police detective. She is equally erratic in her mothering, rushing young Nicky from his discovery of a body hanging in the woods, then casually debating with him later whether it was murder or suicide. Nicky sometimes sounds like a normal little boy, and sometimes strangely adult for his tender years. For the animal lovers, there’s Winky the cat, with no less than six plugs, er, references, to events in the preceding novel in which Winky helped solve a mystery. At least Winky doesn’t talk.

When an unknown young woman is found hanging in the woods, the police seem baffled by who she might be and how she got there. Jane feels involved since it was her Nicky who found the body, but she is busy professionally with a new client, the renowned child-star Goddess, and personally in helping her assistant, Daniel, plan his shotgun wedding. When the unpopular editor responsible for steering Goddess to Jane is murdered during a party, it seems Jane and friends are the only common denominator. A key factor in tying the two events together hinges on one character’s recognition of another character last seen at the age of five -- a literary stretch to be sure.

Just as Missing Marlene tossed a lesbian sex scene in the middle of a mild-mannered cozy, Hanging Hannah is also not as innocent as it appears at first glance, depicting death by hanging, incest and adultery as its underlying themes. There are multiple deaths, some of which are peripheral to the story and all of which seem to be treated casually by the characters. (One character’s death prompts the fiancé to say, “You asked me if I loved her. I did” as a tear trickles down his face. A week later, he’s having lunch with another woman.) The characters themselves have little depth or sparkle, with the possible exception of Goddess, who is clearly a nut case, but at least an interesting one.

In addition to the aforementioned flaws, Hanging Hannah is poorly edited. On page 249 of the proof copy, a character died by hanging; forty pages later, the same character committed suicide with a gun. The final straw is when the murderer takes 14 pages to recount a lifetime of wrongs before dispatching the latest victim. This is a lazy way of tying together loose ends.

There are many entertaining, clever, thought-provoking, well-written mysteries out there. Hanging Hannah is not one of them. See Jane run. Say bye bye, Jane.

--K. W. Becker