On Thanksgiving Day, LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield and her partner, Ed Taylor, are called to an apartment building on the edge of Beverly Hills to investigate a premeditated and pitiless murder. p No one appears particularly grieved by the shocking end to old-time Hollywood director Owen Sinclair. Surely not three other tenants of the Beverly Malibu, who worked in the motion picture industry during the blacklist years and loathed Sinclair for having been a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. p Nor is Sinclair's latest ex-wife grieved or even his children. Nor film actress and former paramour Maxine Marlowe. Nor Dudley Kincaid, whose brilliant screenplay Sinclair stole. Nor landlady Hazel Turner, whose husband, Jerome, is deceased but not exactly gone... p Kate sifts through tantalizing clues a set of handcuffs fastening the murdered man to his bed of death an album of a Wagner opera a bourbon bottle lightly dosed with arsenic a silver frame miss