Lethally Blond

(Grand Central Publishing, 323 pages)

BAILEY Weggins has the best hipster accessories — an apartment in Greenwich Village, a decade-younger boyfriend and a job at a glossy gossip rag — but the svelte sleuth lacks dimension.The plot in Kate White’s fifth mystery novel in the Weggins series is thin, and the killer’s motive won’t surprise anyone familiar with celebrity stalkings. That said, White’s novel is much like the celebrity magazine her protagonist works for — “crack cocaine for women under 35”.

White, the editor in chief of Cosmopoan<$> magazine, knows what girls like. Bailey is drawn into the drama by a former almost-flame who’s now the star of a hot new television show, gue<$>. He’s ten years younger.

“That kind of age gap hadn’t bothered Cameron Diaz and Demi Moore,” Bailey notes. It doesn’t bother her long either.

Within pages, her new boyfriend has her hunting down a cast member’s killer. There’s plenty of suspects — an old girlfriend, a current girlfriend and a lady on the side. The deceased has cuckolded his director and called in a loan to an unsavoury crew member.

As Bailey makes the rounds of celebrity hotspots to question the potentially guilty and definitely not innocent, she bumps into a documentary filmmaker who br ke her heart when he left to shoot in Turkey. That leads to “the flames of ho’ hell licking at my ankles”.

Bailey’s romantic entanglements provide more interest in the second half of Lethally Blond than the killer she is pursuing. The passages drag as she conducts background research on stalking, and the book’s climactic crime scene falls flat.

The resolution is even more disappointing given that this is White’s fifth time around for the genre. Besides her best-selling mysteries, she has written two suggestively titled self-help books &12; Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead But Gutsy Girls Do <$>and You On Top: Smart, Sexy Skills Every Woman Needs to Set the World On Fire.

Mystery writers such as Marcia Muller and Sara Paretsky got better as their series progressed by adding complexity to their characters and developing more nuanced plots. White doesn’t.

Her characters become more vapid and less interesting the longer she goes on — much like some of the celebrities interviewed in her magazine.

White&17;s Cosmo background pays off with the sex scenes, however. And the pop culture references abound, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Orlando Bloom, Kevin Federline and Jessica Simpson all getting a shout out.

But that’s just not enough to carry the day for Letha Blond<$>, which perhaps more appropriately should be called “Lethally Boring”.