WORST CASE SCENARIO

WORST CASE SCENARIO Michael Bowen (Crown, $24) Based upon the premise that almost everybody in official and semi-official Washington, D.C., is a two-faced, duplicitous weasel capable of using homicide as a career strategy, Worst Case Scenario is an old-fashioned locked-door murder mystery filled with dry wit and shrewd deduction. Bowen's sleuth is a casually brilliant former diplomat named Richard Michaelson. When an eager political job seeker turns up dead in her hotel room in West Virginia, Michaelson and his equally erudite lady friend, Connecticut Avenue bookstore proprietor Marjorie Randolph, suspect that the local police are in over their heads. The two set about deciphering a series of literary acrostic-style clues until the guilty politico is unmasked. Brittle but charming. B+