TENDER PREY by Patricia Roberts
Doubleday; 263 pages; $13.95
The year is 1935, the place New York City. A widow named Mary Stephens answers a personal ad in the Police Gazette and, in the time it now takes for a letter to be mailed crosstown, gets a new husband. John James settles down in her basement apartment and then, after a few weeks, disappears with Junie, the younger of Mary's two daughters. The surviving daughter, Alice, 13, grasps instinctively what Detective Jim Hackett of the department of missing persons grimly suspects: the little girl is dead, a month shy of her tenth birthday,...