Books: The Case of Luscious Laura

ANATOMY OF A MURDER (437 pp.) —Robert Trover — St. Martin's Press ($4.50).

Crime does pay, especially when—as in this novel—it is 1) skillfully packaged as fiction, 2) taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club, 3) sold to the movies before publication, and 4) optioned by a Broadway producer. The payoff in this case goes to John D. Voelker, 54, a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Using the pseudonym of Robert Traver, he writes out of 23 years' experience as a trial lawyer and county prosecutor in Ishpeming (pop. 9,400), a mining center set amid...

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