House to be had -- for a killing

Is it my imagination, or is there any gathering of three or more people in Los Angeles where the conversation does not eventually turn to real estate? The exorbitant prices, the desperate hunt to make an offer on properties before they hit the Multiple Listing Service, the negotiation with a seller whose property has fallen out of escrow, all are grist for the conversational mill when the demand is as high and the supply is as low as it is in the Los Angeles area. But the conversations prompt the question: How far would you go to snag the house of your dreams?

Juliet Applebaum, heroine of Ayelet Waldman’s sprightly Mommy-Track mysteries, must answer that question in the series’ fifth entry, “Murder Plays House.” A former federal public defender and partner in a fledgling private investigation firm, Juliet is pregnant with a surprise third child and living in a two-bedroom apartment in Larchmont. Her husband, Peter Wyeth, is trying to work on another screenplay, but between the children crowding him out of the bed and the property next door undergoing a major renovation, the man can get no rest. Exhausted, he tells his wife to find them a house to buy: “A big house. With lots of beds. At least two for each of us.” Juliet’s work situation is no better -- rats have infested the Westminster garage where she and partner Al Hockey, a former cop, work. Juliet needs a place to hang her multiple hats -- and fast.

In her search for the perfect home-office property, the ravenous P.I. employs her pregnant girlfriend Kat, a food-phobe and a “truly dreadful real estate agent ... lacking the fundamental ability to seem upbeat about even the most roach-infested slum.” Kat shows Juliet properties with killer views of the Hollywood Hills that, given the look of several of Juliet’s former clients loitering around, are at best transitioning from “slum to crime scene.” Finally, they chance upon her dream property: a two-story Greene & Greene-style home and guesthouse in Larchmont. Owned by two gay men (whose decorating skills make them “the Holy Grail of the West L.A. real estate market”), the property is not yet officially on the market.

There’s only one hitch -- the dead body in the guesthouse, that of struggling actress Alicia Felix, who was sister and personal assistant to one of the home’s owners, Felix (a one-name designer whose line of barely there Booty Rags are all the rage among the fashionistas). Alicia’s brutalized and emaciated body haunts Juliet but also presents a rare opportunity: She could offer her services to Felix to solve his sister’s murder, thereby getting not only an inside track on the sale of the property but also adding a celebrity name to her and Al’s client roster.

Working around LAPD homicide detectives, Juliet interviews the people who knew and not exactly loved Alicia: Spike Stevens, the washed-up director of the Left Coast Players, a comedy troupe where Alicia got her start; Julia Brennan, a former member of the ensemble who expropriated Alicia’s signature character, Bingie McPurge, and rode it to stardom; and Charlie Hoynes, ex-bedmate and producer of a soft-core vampire series on cable TV. They are the subjects of Juliet’s spot-on analyses, including the gem: “Ah, Hollywood, the only place on earth where the definition of ‘friend’ includes someone you’ve hated for years.”

But as the investigation wears on -- and Juliet consumes prodigious amounts of food -- she learns that Alicia’s struggles with an eating disorder are at the opposite end of a spectrum of self-loathing that includes her own obsession with her pregnancy weight gain: “They were aerobicized and stepped and Zone-dieted down to a svelteness that only a town that idolized the broomstick likes of Calista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle could have considered normal. Alongside them, I felt hugely, lumberingly, hideously fat.” And when her 6-year-old daughter starts worrying about “carbohydrapes” and diets, Juliet realizes she has some serious work to do on the kinds of messages being transmitted in the Wyeth-Applebaum household.

Amid the laughs, Waldman makes some serious points about female body image and women’s relationships to food. They make “Murder Plays House” an engaging read, enough so that you can overlook Juliet’s rampant cynicism about the entertainment industry that feeds her family and the author’s occasional gaffes about Los Angeles geography and architectural styles. “Murder Plays House” is a stellar entry in a series notable for its humor and intelligence, and it should bring Waldman and her heroine a broker’s caravan of new fans. *