A BODY IS FOUND

Another ""created by Bill Adler"" concoction: ten stories built around a single fact--""a body being found face-down in New York""--that are purportedly the outgrowth of a monthly luncheon meeting regularly attended by Thomas Chastain, Mary Higgins Clark, Stanley Cohen, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Lucy Freeman, Mickey Friedman, Joyce Harrington, Judith Kelman, Warren Murphy, and Justin Scott. The only charming story, by Cohen, concerns a couple who schlep home a rolled rug they find on the street, unfurl it, and bounce out a corpse. Also appealing is Friedman's tale of the body in the backyard of a brownstone--a body that could get there only via the narrator's apartment, but she didn't do it. As for the rest, both Clark and Murphy lose their respective lottery tales; Freeman ignores the corpse and has her psychoanalyst sleuth concentrate on motive; Davis sets reporter Julie Hayes on an art escapade; Chastain features a courtroom enactment, while Kelman opts for the subway and Harrington tackles the Tenderloin district. Scott concludes the package in a publishers office. No match for the Algonquin's Round Table and salvageable only through the efforts of Cohen and Friedman.