Color fading on book jacket Doubleday & Co, 1980 book club edition, 180 pages The Glendale, California, police blotter has been piling up for weeks, and Detectives Vic Varallo and Delia Rior-dan have their hands full. Their case load is a regular catalogue of criminal activity; it seems the local underworld's been working overtime. There's the stickup artist who's been knocking off motels. So far, he's hit three, and gotten away clean every time, There's the fellow who has a thing for nurses. He's proof of the adage that a crook will always return to the scene of his crime; this one returns again and again to the hospital parking lot, and each visit supplies a new rape victim. There's the abandoned, abused child whose grandparents think hes the devil's spawn, Their mistreatment has reduced him to a starving, mindless vegetable. And, just for variety, there's a teenage suicide, a knife murder at the railroad station, and the mysterious case of an elderly woman whose fatal heart attack came as a surprise to an old friend. The odd thing there is that she'd never had a history of heart disease-and that she left her considerable estate to someone pretty unlikely. So Vic and Delia have their work cut out for them, and there's plenty of it for the two dedicated cops. Until Delia encounters Dr. Neil Fordyce, an archaeologist she's been very much in love with, and has to re-evaluate her devotion to police work.