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Not many tears are shed when Clifton Holt, artistic director of the National Ballet Company, is stabbed to death by a drug addict. His dancers had regarded him as a martinet, and his board of directors as a threat to their social ambitions. But what appears to be one more senseless Manhattan murder takes an abrupt turn when the killer is himself killed in prison after bragging that he was paid $24,000 for the Holt job. "Damn," says Reuben Frost, "will all this be in the papers?" Not a chance. For Frost, retired Wall Street lawyer and the dance company's board chairman, is also friends with N.Y.P.D. Detective Luis Bautista, who promises to "keep the lid on" until the case is solved. The pair met in Haughton Murphy's first novel, Murder for Lunch. In their second encounter, the Princeton-educated attorney and the Puerto Rican- born cop blend culture and crime as expertly as the bartender at Frost's private club mixes martinis.
COMMUNION
by Whitley Strieber
Morrow; 299 pages; $17.95
! They're here. Creatures from Out There, UFOs are invading the nation's bookstores. Moreover, these accounts of aliens are not sci-fi; they are on nonfiction shelves, and one has even climbed up the best-seller list. In 1985, according to Novelist Whitley Strieber (The Wolfen), small creatures with "fierce, limitless eyes" abducted him from his cottage in upstate New York and subjected him to painful prods and probes. Through hypnosis, Strieber later recalled more than a dozen similar occurrences. Credibility is dissipated when he remembers "being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut" and evaporates when he speaks of tarot cards and the riddle of the sphinx. Strieber lobbies for understanding between humans and aliens: "two universes spinning each other together . . . the old weaver of reality rethreading creation's loom." The last time anyone dispensed such advice was on The Twilight Zone, where it belonged.