The Eighth Commandment

When a rare coin vanishes, an appraiser tries to clear her name—and exposes one family’s lethal secretsAppraising rare coins for Grandby & Sons, a venerable Madison Avenue auction house, is a dream come true for Mary Lou Bateson. She even gets a chance to inspect the Havistock Collection of priceless coins, which includes the Demaretion, a rare, ancient Greek silver piece. But when the Demaretion disappears just after her assessment, the young numismatist becomes the number-one suspect.Placed on indefinite leave, Bateson enlists the help of a New York Police Department cop and an insurance detective to go behind the closed doors of one of New York’s most powerful and untouchable families. The Havistocks are keeping some dangerous secrets, including a kleptomaniac daughter, a sex-addicted daughter-in-law, and a sleazy nest of adultery, pornography, and damning secrets someone is willing to kill to keep.From Publishers WeeklySanders's legion of fans will be disappointed by this caper/suspense tale that is clearly a lesser effort by the bestselling novelist. Six-foot-two and every inch of her honest, Mary Lou "Dunk" Bateson is a coin appraiser at a New York auction house. She is forced to become an amateur detective when a prized Greek coin disappears from a collection that has been transferred to her company for auction. First treated as a prime suspect, Dunk determines to clear her name by ferreting out the real thief. In the process, she finds two interesting suitors in the cop and the insurance investigator who are assigned to the case, as well as encountering the bizarre family of Archibald Havistock, owner of the purloined coin. As she meets the Havistock household, Dunk uncovers scandal and perversity in the family closet, providing her with plenty of suspects. More lighthearted than Sanders's lurid crime novels, this is nonetheless far from a compelling spellbinder. Literary Guild selection; first serial to Cosmopolitan. (June 5pLYING IN STATECopyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.