MURDER ON THE RUN

Eleven more stories by the self-styled successors to the Algonquin Round Table who seem to defray the costs of their monthly dinners by periodic anthologies (Justice in Manhattan, 1994, etc.). The theme this timemurderers on the runis construed pretty loosely: Murder on the Road might have been a better title for Lawrence Block's mid-grade Keller story or Peter Straub's overlong tale of a traveling assassin. Most of the stories, from Dorothy Salisbury Davis's sketch of a hit-and-run perp to Mickey Friedman's lazy Caribbean saga of an innocent who sails into the middle of a killing field to Mary Higgins Clark's latest about Willy and Alvirah, are typical rather than distinctive; even the most offbeatStanley Cohen's cautionary, Kind Ladyish fable of why you shouldn't take the homeless to lunch and Whitley Strieber's portrait of a turn-of-the-century gentleman trying to maintain his gentility despite his antisocial activitiesseem incomplete, as if they were preliminary studies rather than final products. Joyce Harrington, Judith Kelman, Warren Murphy, and Justin Scott complete the party. An all-star lineup that, sadly, offers no more excitement than the average All-Star game.