Follow this 'Road' carefully

By MARY CAMPBELL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In "Hardscrabble Road" (St. Martin's Minotaur), Jane Haddam has written a mystery for readers who pay attention.
The situation is complicated. Politics is mentioned often because an election is coming in Philadelphia. The problems of the homeless are discussed even more than usual because it's an especially cold winter.
When a murdered body turns up, it isn't the person the reader and the police expect it to be. A second body turns up, and that isn't the expected victim, either.
It's a good thing Gregor Demarkian, retired FBI agent, gets involved. This is the 20th novel starring Demarkian and this time his mind is upset because he realizes that something is wrong between him and his girlfriend, but he doesn't know what.
Despite that quandary, he will figure out the murder mystery.
The situation is that Drew Harrigan, a celebrity right-wing radio talker, was arrested for having drugs in his car and was sent by a judge to rehab.
Harrigan named a homeless man as his drug supplier. On that man's behalf, the Justice Project sued Harrigan for defamation. Harrigan had donated a piece of property to a monastery that needs money and has an anonymous buyer for the land. But the sale is halted by a lien, a precaution taken in case the buyer was planning to return the land to Harrigan once the defamation suit is settled.
Then the homeless man disappears.
The characters are distinctive. There's a super-genius math professor, lawyers for opposing sides who used to be a married couple, a beautiful nun who's also a lawyer, two very different homeless advocates, and two worried executives of a radio network.
Several of them have secrets. And the reader learns as much about them as the very careful Haddam decides to share at any one time.
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