MUGGER'S DAY

Bagby's cutesy narrating style always seems out of place when the case involves Manhattan's seedier locales--and this time Baggy and Inspector Schmidt are slumming with a vengeance, investigating a particular pattern of welfare mothers in one neighborhood being mugged on the day they get their checks. And the case becomes a homicide when underneath the battered body of a neighborhood bum they find. . . the welfare identity card of the latest mugging victim, fertile Norah Simms (""a baby-making assembly line. She didn't even pause for station identification""). Then an old lady in Norah's old building is garrotted--and Norah herself, with her bodybuilder-actor boyfriend, are under suspicion. But the real culprit is heavily foreshadowed from the beginning, making this an unmysterious mystery, heavily padded with tenement-style local color--second-rate Bagby, and a disappointment after the stylish improvement in recent (uptown) outings.