Concourse

Rozan nails down the promise of China Trade, her debut and the introduction of memorable New York City PIs Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. Here, Smith goes undercover for his mentor Bobby Moran, who now runs a security firm. One of Moran's young employees has been brutally murdered-kicked to death by an expert in martial arts-while on the job at the Bronx Home for the Aged in an elegant old building on the no longer elegant Grand Concourse. Although the murder carries trademarks of the work of the Cobras, a powerful gang, Smith, posing as a Moran employee, investigates the premises and staff of the Home. Quickly, another member of the security staff is similarly killed; later, a member of the Home's staff is fatally shot in someone else's tossed apartment. Smith runs afoul of the Cobras while defending another Home employee, but his probings suggest that even more powerful villains are at work in philanthropic and political circles of the Bronx. Rozan's dense, credible plot cuts through all circles of its urban hell and is resolved with drama and realistic ambiguity. Her major characters-the classical piano-playing Smith who's in love with the independent, Asian-American Chin-and the minor cast, from dimensionally portrayed gang members to delicately drawn Home residents, leave a lasting impression. Rozan brings a distinctive, commanding voice to the genre. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Chinatown p.i. Lydia Chin's sometime partner Bill Smith (China Trade, 1994) takes over as narrator and principal investigator in this tale of murder and worse at the Bronx Home for the Aged. Bill is called in to get the killer of his old mentor's nephew and employee, security guard Mike Downey; but it's soon obvious that Downey's murder is only a tiny piece of a deeply felonious puzzlea puzzle that ranges from real-estate scams to extortion high (a sweetheart deal between Helping Hands, which runs the Home and other equally Homey institutions, with a local hospital for unnecessary procedures) and low (protection payoffs to the gun-toting Cobra gang), with skimming at every level in between. The three parallel monsters in charge of keeping the pot boilinghead Cobra Anthony ``Snake'' LeMoyne; Helping Hands dragon Francine Wyckoff; and smiling Andy Hill (``call me Andy''), Community Liaison to the Bronx Borough Presidentare so hypnotically entertaining that you almost forget that Bill himself, who plays Schubert and dreams of a better Bronx, is a much less interesting storyteller than Lydia. Richly and rewardingly plottedthough, as in Bill and Lydia's debut, there are as many felonies and perps as on the eleven o'clock news.