A Prize On the Lam

By AMELIA WEISS

TITLE: AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

AUTHOR: SUSAN ISAACS

PUBLISHER: HARPERCOLLINS 343 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: Isaacs creates a suburban detective who, though no tanned beauty, is perfect for the beach.

At 3:30 in the morning, Rose Meyers, a middle-aged Jewish English teacher who can't sleep, wanders down to the kitchen of her ritzy Long Island home to grab some nonfat yogurt and trips over the body of her estranged husband, the millionaire Richie, stabbed through the heart with a carving knife from Williams-Sonoma. Because he cheated on Rosie for 25 years and then dumped her, some might say the bum deserved every stainless-steel inch. Nevertheless, Rosie tries to pull the knife out of Richie's body. With hers the only fingerprints on the murder weapon, and plenty of reasons to want to see the stinker dead, Rose Meyers, mother of two, becomes suspect No. 1.

Envisioning a life spent in the prison library at Bedford Hills, "in the company of women who do not care about Jane Austen," Rosie goes on the lam to find the murderer. Was it Richie's old partner Mitch, so antisocial he orders his pizza by fax? Or Richie's new girlfriend Jessica, the blond M.B.A. with the six-figure salary and no cellulite? (So why wasn't Jessica found with a kitchen knife in her chest?) Was it Rosie's Waspy neighbor who makes brioche from scratch, using the seven-hour classic recipe (no freezing the dough)? Or Richie's sister Carol, "Our Lady of the Bikini Wax"? Rosie, the last-to-know wife, vows to get the answers first. A woman whose last task as a civilian was to grade papers on "The Gamut of Love in Pride and Prejudice" becomes an adventurer.

She has a night of wild sex with a former pupil (and, boy, does she teach him a thing or two!). She recharges an old romance with a fabulously wealthy financier. She eludes the entire Nassau County police department. And, oh, yes, she catches the killer. Isaacs' heroines are never the usual trophy wives (she can't make a silk purse out of a Coach bag); instead they are a prize greater than rubies. In the fight against women with skinny thighs and no love handles, they always win (hence the fantasy quality of Isaacs' fiction). Accents from Queens and Brooklyn may flavor their speech, but they are aristocrats to their wisecracking bones, and woe to the Richies, those slobs, who can't appreciate them. Because, in her fictional universe, Isaacs plays God, her vengeance is swift and funny, and her heroines live happily ever after.