Whacked

Dani writes for the TV crime series Flesh and Bone and obsesses equally over gruesome crimes and her gruesome love life — why, oh why won’t her insensitive director boyfriend propose? (Hope he’s not based on Steven Soderbergh, the former E! anchor’s real-life hubby.) But instead of offering incisive commentary on the detached souls who feed us our prime-time diet of brutality, Jules Asner’s Whacked stews in stiff dialogue and lifeless prose. It takes 254 pages of psychobabble and L.A. landmark name-dropping to get to the twist that makes Dani remotely interesting. Too bad the book ends just 40 pages later. C-