I mean, look what happens to Annie Seymour on a single assignment. She watches a popular restaurant burn. She ends up on the scene of a murder. She gets shot at herself. She finds herself threatened, followed, invited inside a car for a private chat with a mobster. And she gets one heck of a story.

It's a wonder she ever finds time to do her laundry.

Oh wait. Annie Seymour doesn't work for the New Haven Register. She covers the cops for the New Haven Herald. You know. The monopoly daily newspaper in town.

The Herald is the Register, of course -- thinly disguised in a series of hard-boiled murder mysteries written by a Register newsroom veteran, Karen E. Olson. Annie Seymour is the series' heroine, a cynical, cut-throat, work-obsessed, sometimes heartless newshound everyone loves to hate. Or, if you're a reporter yourself, the newshound you'd secretly love to be.

Mysterious Press, a Time Warner imprint, released Olsen's latest Annie Seymour novel this week. It's called Secondhand Smoke. Like its predecessor, Sacred Cows, it's a fast-paced, delicious guilty pleasure.

And a trip through the New Haven we know and love.

In between jawboning (and getting sweaty) with cops or a private investigator, arm-wrestling with newsroom colleagues, and chasing down bad guys, Annie Seymour fulfills her Sally's or Consiglio's or Claire's cravings. She takes us on rides down Chapel Street past the park in Wooster Square near her brownstone.

Olson (pictured) captures not just the landmarks but the essence of New Haven. She takes us inside a town where conflicts of interest are harder to avoid driving into than one-way streets or illegal parking spaces -- where the cops and the reporters and the crooks not only know each other, but have slept with each other, or gone to school together, or grown up with each other's relatives. Olson's New Haven, like real-life New Haven, is a Venn diagram with distinct ethnic and cultural enclaves, of Wooster Square and Morris Cove Italian-Americans and of Yalies and animal-rights gasbags and Westville Jews, who inevitably bump into each other and cross boundaries with sometimes uproarious, sometimes painful results.

Tough town, New Haven. In Secondhand Smoke, even the chickens are in on the racket.

Olson, like her heroine, also knows how to get a story. Secondhand Smoke starts with a fire at a popular Wooster Square restaurant. It follows the trail of a first, then a second murder that reveals a parallel underworld universe in New Haven. It also reveals a family tie that until now the middle-aged Seymour has wanted not to explore. To get to the truth, Seymour has to battle a pesky cub reporter, neighbors who don't quite consider her one of their own, and her own unrequited feelings about a cop and a p.i. in the know.

Annie is part Philip Marlowe, part Nancy Drew. Like Humphrey Bogart's classic Raymond Chandler detective, she hides a sentimental, idealistic heart inside a crusty, cynical exterior. And she can never seem to keep her professional pursuits separate from her romantic pursuits.

Like Carolyn Keene's ageless girl detective, Annie, at least in her first two books, keeps running into thugs amid the shadows who shoot at her, threaten her, or beat her just to the point of death, but not quite.

To wit:

"...I turned toward Wooster Square. I pulled up in front of my brownstone and parked. The streetlights played against the snow, casting weird shadows. I didn't look toward Prego as I got out of the car and started up toward the steps.
"Someone grabbed me from behind, and an arm stretched across my chest, keeping me from turning around, my arms pinned behind me.
"'What?' I started to say, but a hand clasped over my mouth.
"'Listen,' a voice hissed in my ear, 'you better stop messing around in things that don't concern you.'
"The arm wrenched my body backward... like I were going to snap in two. I tried to catch my breath, but the hand over my mouth was tight and sweaty.
"'Hey!' The shout came somewhere from my left, and in a second the grip loosened and I fell to the ground, the slush seeping into my skirt. I heard footsteps off to my right, and with a stab of pain in my side, I looked toward them. A large shadow disappeared around the corner..."

Most of all, author Olson nabs the essence of the news reporter. Annie bitches, bitches, bitches. About her paper. About her assignments. About stories that consume her life. About close-mouthed sources who make you push, push, push to tease out every tidibit of information. And yet it's clear: She couldn't imagine doing anything else.

Who can blame her?

Karen Olson, who until recently was the New Haven Register's travel editor, will make the following appearances to discuss her new book: Oct. 4 at R. J. Julia in Madiosn; Oct. 6 at the Book Vault in Wallingford; Oct. 7 at the New Haven Free Public Library. For details check her website.

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