THE KOBERG LINK

Oh, Mr. Potter, please come right away! Something terrible's happened!"" So again it's Brock Potter, stockbroker-sleuth, to the rescue--responding to calamity in the life of one of his loyal employees. This time it's the pregnant niece of his twittery secretary Helen: she has just found her sweet fianc≤ murdered in his Columbia U. apartment. Potter doesn't exactly take the case, but it so happens that he's already professionally interested in the dead man's family: he was the disenfranchised great-grandson of the founder of Koberg Chemical, a stagnant old company that's recently been making surprising leaps upward in the market. So it's off to Chicago, to interview a clutch of Koberg-related octogenarians (including the murdered lad's dying grandmother)--an investigation that gets Brock gunshot-wounded before he uncovers both an attempted company takeover and a semi-insane killer. Guessable solutions, it's true--but the brokerage personnel have never been more charmingly rendered (they're bickering these days), and Brock remains one of the most appealing, slightly sad amateur sleuths in fiction today. . . especially for those with an eye for the Big Board.