UP JUMPED THE DEVIL

Mark Dillard has had it with affirmative action and the decline of old-fashioned American values. Together with his dim cohorts—a disgruntled trash collector, a handyman who's good with tools, and a hot-headed kid—he's ready to stick it to Baltimore's African-American community. First, this cadre of neo- Nazi wannabes plans to execute drugstore king/NAACP donor Sheldon Blumberg. Then they'll plant a pipe bomb in the sanitation department, and follow it up with a few trash-can specials, just to keep everybody guessing, before moving on to the main course: blowing up the NAACP headquarters. But somebody who knows Dillard's plans has been phoning black police reporter Darryl Billups at the Baltimore Herald with a series of anonymous tips. Will Darryl—who's already got his dance card full with a mugging (his own), a hot new love interest, and the smilingly unscrupulous colleagues who'd stop at nothing to steal his best stories—dismiss the androgynous tipster as a crank, or use the info to stop the killing before the NAACP building is toast? What ought to be a foolproof nail-biter is sabotaged with so many subplots and scores to settle—the characters have as many unrelated stories to tell as the Herald's Metro section—that Dillard's crew of crazies is shrunk down to just one more nuisance in Darryl's life. But first-novelist Walker certainly has a big enough canvas for the promised series.