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Inspector Lloyd (whose first name is still a mystery) is a by-the-
book kind of police officer with impeccable deduction skills. 
Judy Hill is a tireless investigator and interrogator.  Together
they are a superior team, digging their way through the
scandalous crimes that take place in Stansfield, England.
But Lloyd and Hill face scandal in more than just their
professional lives.  They began a tumultuous affair in the first
book of the series that has continued despite the fact that Judy
has been, until recently, married.
Their relationship takes another turn in the latest McGown
mystery, A SHRED OF EVIDENCE.  The quiet town of Stansfield is
once more disrupted by a horrible crime.  A teenage girl is found
dead near a playground, and Lloyd and Hill are convinced the
murderer is someone connected to the school.  What they uncover
is a multitude of secrets, and a tragic, twisted plot of sexual
obsession.
Jill McGown is an expert at exposing the dark side of country
life.  A native of Argyll, Scotland, she has lived in Corby,
England, since she was ten.
The Lloyd/Hill mysteries in series order are:
A PERFECT MATCH, paperback (449-21820-1, 12/90)
MURDER AT THE OLD VICARAGE, paperback (449-21819-8, 5/91)
GONE TO HER DEATH, paperback (449-21966-6, 12/91)
MURDER MOVIE, paperback (449-22070-2, 1/93)
THE MURDERS OF MRS. AUSTIN AND MRS. BEALE, paperback (449-22162-8, 2/94)
THE OTHER WOMAN, paperback (449-22272-1, 12/94)
MURDER NOW...AND THEN, paperback (449-22311-6, 3/95)
A SHRED OF EVIDENCE, hardcover (449-91066-0, 7/96)
                                                                  
THE LAST WORD: DISPATCH FROM A COLD COUNTRY by Robert Cullen ----
    
Robert Cullen has been a reporter, abroad and in Washington, for
nearly twenty years.  As Newsweek's Moscow correspondent he won
an Overseas Press Club award for foreign reporting.  He is the
author of four previous books, including SOVIET SOURCES (a _New
York Times_ Notable Book of the Year) which featured Colin Burke,
a reporter for a Washington newspaper.  In DISPATCH FROM A COLD
COUNTRY, Cullen has taken Burke back to Russia to find out what
happened to a stringer, a young woman he encouraged to work in
Russia, who was murdered in a most brutal and sadistic manner. 
In this excerpt, he introduces us to the characters who set the
plot in motion.  Read on....
     Jennifer Morelli stepped gratefully to the front of the
checkout line at the Hotel Northern Worker, a hostelry she hoped
fervently never to visit again.
     It was a tired, cold hotel in a tired, cold district of St.
Petersburg, a hotel that hadn't bothered to change the name it
had been given in 1954, when the city was Leningrad, the country
was the Soviet Union, and foreigners were carefully segregated
from such places.
     In the new Russia, the Northern Worker had discovered that
there were certain Westerners of limited means -- teachers,
impecunious art buffs, and the occasional freelance writer like
Morelli -- willing to pay dollars, though less than a hundred of
them, for a small, musty room, bath down the hall.  In the era of
transition from communism to capitalism, this was like learning
that the frail little babushka who shared your communal apartment
had real jewelry hidden under her mattress.
     Behind Morelli, an old woman, wearing a parka and a black
astrakhan hat, moved a dirty mop slowly back and forth over the
granite floor of the lobby.  In the far corner, an attendant
dozed behind a portable bar marked _KAFE_.  He had no customers;
he was out of coffee.
     Morelli leaned over the counter of the cashier's booth,
waiting for the woman behind it to tally the surcharge for her
phone calls.  Dexterously, the woman slipped wooden beads back
and forth on an abacus.
     "Three hundred thirty-four thousand, three hundred rubles,"
she finally announced.  It was the equivalent of about fifty
dollars.
     "Any discount for the days when there was no hot water?" 
Morelli asked.
     The woman behind the counter looked at first stupefied. 
Then she giggled softly at this eccentric foreign attempt at
humor.  She shook her head.
     Carefully taking two slips of carbon paper, she wrote out a
receipt in triplicate, and Morelli handed over a wad of rubles
about two inches thick.  Laboriously the cashier counted them. 
When she was satisfied, she handed Morelli the top copy of the
receipt -- and her blue passport.  She was free to go.
     Then she heard someone mention her name.
     She turned to her right, startled.  Twenty feet away, in
front of the registration desk, stood a man in an open and openly
expensive leather overcoat.  He had, she thought, an odd body, a
body that was all torso and arms.  His legs were short and bowed,
he had no neck, and his ears were like wrinkled pancakes, pressed
close to his bullet-shaped head.
     "Morelli," he was saying, in the kind of Russian accent she
was used to hearing in peasant's markets.  "Jennifer Morelli. 
What room is she in?"  His voice was low and gravelly.
     She was about to walk up to the man and identify herself,
but something about him made her stop.  She could not have said
what it was -- something in his tone of voice or the way he
carried himself.  So instead of identifying herself, she shrank. 
She was a tall woman, six feet even, and always had been tall,
taller than all the boys all the way through grade school.  Now
her body reflexively went into the stoop-shouldered posture she'd
employed then to make her gangling self inconspicuous and small.
She took a step backward, until she was partly screened by one of
the hotel pillars.
     The clerk at the registration desk said he was not allowed
to give out guests' room numbers.
     It was the sort of routine bureaucratic obstacle that
Russians of the post-perestroika era had learned to surmount with
a small packet of rubles.  But the man in the leather coat did
not reach for his wallet.
     Instead, he laid an enormous, thick-fingered hand on the
counter, palm down, knuckles lightly flexed.  He put the other
hand in the pocket of the coat and pushed it open a bit further.
     He was wearing a gun in a black leather holster.
     "Don't give me trouble," he said to the clerk.  "Give me the
room number."
     The clerk looked furtively behind him, perhaps checking to
see if the hotel director was within earshot.  There was no one
there.  He took a scrap of paper and picked up a pen.  He
scrawled something on the paper and handed it to the man in the
leather coat.  
     The man looked at it, nodded, and walked over to the
stairwell, rather than the hotel's single, creaking elevator.  He
pushed open the fire door and disappeared.                        
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Susan Randol
Senior Editor
Ballantine Publishing Group
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