Spy Gal

PAST PERFECT

A Novel

By Susan Isaacs

Scribner. 340 pp. $25

With 10 bestselling novels to date, Susan Isaacs has made a career out of conjuring up gumptious gals. In her new book, Past Perfect, Isaacs returns to a pairing that has served her well: sassy New York mom + murder.

Katie Schottland is a soon-to-be-40 Upper West Sider packing her beloved, chunky son, Nicky, off to Camp Lionheart for the summer, where he will eat fruit kebabs and exercise nonstop in the hope of being freed from "large-bellied shorts." Ostensibly, this also will give Katie more time to spend with her veterinarian husband and to focus on her career as the writer for cable TV's "Spy Guys," "a fluffy forty-seven minutes for viewers who enjoyed being willfully ignorant about the actual doings of the Central Intelligence Agency."

But Nicky's departure for Maine coincides with a bizarre phone call from an ex-colleague, a shallow woman whom Katie worked with during a two-year stint in her mid-20s as a real-deal CIA analyst. Seems this Lisa Golding wants to tell her something "of national importance" and, as a sweetener, also promises to reveal info on why Katie was inexplicably fired from the agency, a blow from which her pride has never recovered. But there's a problem: After that first call, Lisa never calls back. Some people might blow this off, but Katie's so routinely anxious -- or so Spy Guy'd out -- that she sees ways in which even an innocent run in the park could accidentally turn deadly: "being attacked by a swarm of bees, tripping over a tree root and smashing [her] head, getting run over by an out-of-control in-line skater."

So she frets.

Then probes.

Then, to jog her memory, she digs up the secret notes she took while working with Lisa at the CIA. (Yes, she used to come home from Langley and take notes -- not the wisest way to unwind.) Before you know it, she's dealing with Cold War history and cold dead people.

Lots of Isaacs trademarks are in full force here: a funny, smart and smart-alecky heroine; a good supporting cast; and wit to burn, including some classic Red State/Blue State digs. But the pace is strangely uneven. The book starts slowly as Katie recounts her CIA days and their upsettingly abrupt ending to her mother, father, sister and even ex-brother-in-law. One at a time. By the novel's end, though, the action is heart-thumpingly fast and creepy as Katie follows a tenuous line of clues to "fried pork rinds country" and winds up cornering a killer.

Isaacs is so good at what she does that her deservedly loyal fans are bound to be charmed. Newcomers looking to get hooked, though, should start with her popular and immediately absorbing family drama Any Place I Hang My Hat.

-- Claudia Deane is a writer in Washington, D.C.