New thrillers on the shelves.(The Orlando Sentinel)

Practice must make perfect after all because Tami Hoag, with nine bestsellers to her credit in little more than three years, just keeps getting better.

"Dust to Dust" (Bantam, $25.95, hardcover, 254 pages), her new thriller starring homicide cop Sam Kovac and his partner Nikki Liska, never misses a beat from the time the nude body of a young Internal Affairs cop is found hanging from a ceiling beam in his apartment to the final untangling of the mystery.

Kovac is a delightful old grouch but as tenacious as a bulldog with a bone, and when the victim turns out to be Andy Fallon, son of Kovac's onetime mentor, there is no stopping him in the hunt for clues.

The trouble is the police brass are happy with a cursory ruling that the homosexual Andy Fallon killed himself, and even his father, wheelchair-bound since an accident on the job, doesn't want to …