Little Angel Street /

The joyous weirdness of Charyn's idiosyncratic New York City can't be described-it must be experienced. Nor can Isaac Sidel, Charyn's one-of-a-kind protagonist and former Commissioner of the NYPD, be understood on brief acquaintance. Here, in the fourth absorbing book of Charyn's Odessa quartet (following Montezuma's Man), it is the mid 1980s and Sidel has been elected mayor, with a month to go before taking office. Subject to his usual paranoia, the former Commish is hiding out in homeless shelters under an assumed name. Now bums are being killed, each one labeled with Sidel's fake name. The murders are claimed by a racist gang who call themselves the Knickerbocker Boys and use the names of Sidel's beloved 19th-century baseball stars. That a few of these white racists might be black is the sort of anomaly that Sidel takes in stride. Some trails lead to a Times Square porn palace where Romanian orphans are made available for pedophiles and where the sultry Rita works. Perhaps she can cure Isaac of his bitter love for Margaret Tolstoy, who has a bad habit of sleeping with Isaac's enemies. Other trails lead to the racists, who may have infiltrated an organization dedicated to historic-building preservation. Table tennis and baseball are near religions, and as always there are too many characters to track (someone should write a Sidel glossary). Puzzle-loving readers should take careful note of Charyn's use of perhaps and may, practicing Sidelian vigilance-the road to Gracie Mansion is loaded with potholes. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This title completes the "Odessa Quartet" (Montezuma's Man, LJ 8/93), Charyn's second series featuring Isaac Sidel. Here, Police Commissioner/Mayor-elect Sidel reacts with his usual determination when a widespread rash of murders threaten New York City. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Charyn winds up his New Isaac Quartet (Montezuma's Man, 1993, etc.) with the inauguration of Isaac Sidel, the Pink Commish, as mayor of New York. But before the champagne is poured, there's the little matter of three dead men, two of whom had signed into the city's homeless shelters as Geronimo Jones in honor of Isaac's own undercover alias. The third is found in Grand Central with a threatening note signed by ten dead ballplayers calling themselves the Knickerbocker Boys. The note leads Isaac, stranded between his powerful role as police commissioner and his future powers as mayor, to preservationist and old-time baseball fan Schyler Knott, or it would if Knott hadn't disappeared just after swearing opposition to the razing of a building built by the late, revered architect Emeric Gray. Meantime, Albert Wiggens, point man for incoming commissioner Sweets Montgomery, is convinced the first Geronimo was killed by Rita Mae Robinson, a prostitute who seems to be minding the kidnapped Rumanian children imported by pornographer Quentin Kahn and Ping-Pong champ King Carol. A few more murders, a couple of trips to Europe, a stroll down memory lane to the street in Odessa where Isaac's beloved Margaret Tolstoy was carried off as the child bride of the Butcher of Bucharest, and it's obvious that all the crooks, as usual, are just playing out slightly more sanguinary versions of the incessant rivalries among the mayor's office and the police, the governor, the FBI. A deliriously overplotted Hitchhiker's Guide to the Big Apple adorned with a demotic style and cartoon-epic conventions that would make it perfectly logical for the hero's bemused father to pop up ten pages from the end.