Every so often Stout thins the ranks of the Wolfe entourage--a while back he bumped off one of the stable of free-lance operatives, leaving only Saul, Fred and Orrie. Another gets pruned in the course of the latest Rusterman's Restaurant murder investigation, after a faintly mechanical sequence of leads including Watergate, Women's Lib and a horny widow. Not one of Stout's zippiest, but the old pro still has a lot of polish.
