In his fifth work of suspense, Jonathan Santlofer writes and illustrates a chilling conspiracy straight out of today's headlines. He's due at Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont tomorrow, to talk about it.

Featuring his new creation, police sketch artist Nate Rodriguez, the story revolves around a series of seemingly unrelated murders -- a college student stabbed, another beaten to death, a third man stabbed in Central Park -- that have created a feeding frenzy for New York tabloids and heat for the New York City police.

		"THE MURDER NOTEBOOK" By Jonathan Santlofer William Morrow ($24.95) The author discusses and sells his book tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at Mystery Lovers Bookshop, 514 Allegheny River Blvd., Oakmont. Reservations: 412-828-4877.

Rodriguez' job is to sketch the faces of the killers from witnesses' accounts.

Then the suspects start showing up as suicide victims. Rodriguez, who is equipped with powers that help him produce uncannily accurate sketches, suspects the deaths are related and sets out to convince his superiors.

He hasn't yet put it together when two federal agents take over the cases. Rodriguez stubbornly continues his own investigation even after he's beaten twice and his apartment is ransacked.

His life is also complicated by another difficult case, unresolved guilt over his father's death and his mother's impending second marriage.

Santlofer juggles his character's demanding life deftly while using his drawings not as a gimmick but only when they serve to forward one of the story lines. This is not a graphic novel.

His prose is spare, but just as illustrative as his drawings. If you find the conspiracy Rodriguez untangles unbelievable, look at Santlofer's appendix where he lists programs, articles and experiments he researched.

Long recognized for his visual arts, first for his abstracts then for more representational works, Santlofer began writing in 1989 after a fire in a Chicago gallery destroyed most of his artwork. In 2002, he published his first novel, "The Death Artist."