THE COP WITH THE PINK PISTOL

Consigned to detective hell—desk duty with an occasional robbery squeal—for unspecified departmental infractions, NYPD’s Donna Prima seeks redemption with help from a daytime drama star.

Even though he’s the second lead on TV’s top-rated Vampire Love Nest, right now Conner Anderson is just one more pissed off New Yorker. He wants the scumbag who broke into his Greenwich Village walk-up and stole his late father’s Ole Miss class ring publicly guillotined in Times Square. And even though Donna Prima thinks burglaries are a pain in the ass, she sees that Conner is kind of cute, in a drawly Southern way. So after work she goes back to his apartment and lets him show her the strange doings at O’Toole’s, the pub across the street. And damned if the guy isn’t as right as he’s good-looking. First, a black guy pulls up in a Rolls-Royce, wearing a full-length fox coat in the August heat. Then he goes into O’Toole’s. Then he emerges, not from the bar, but from the liquor store next door. When their surveillance is interrupted by shouts and shots, the detective and her amateur sidekick go into high gear (or as high as his Smart Car will let them). Pretty soon, they’ve drawn a bead on Fibonacci Brothers, trash haulers upstate in Port Juttistown, which is deliciously near the Dutch Point nuclear facility, a reactor losing track of uranium at an alarming rate according to two feds named Wilson and Holm. Figuring out what’s going down at Fibonacci Brothers just might be Donna’s ticket back to homicide—as long as she doesn’t have to use her pink snub-nosed .38 to find out.

Fast-paced and hilarious, Basnight’s debut makes the most of its offbeat crew and a New York locale as American as falafel.