BOHEMIAN HEART

Foiled in generations of his family's attempts to get the goods on those thieving San Francisco developers the Farraguts—culminating in his dismissal from the police force after he's accused William Farragut IV of conniving in the murder of the gay mayor—p.i. Frankie Fagen gets some revenge when Farragut's murdered, and a shot at still more when the alluring widow Colleen hires him to find evidence that will get her off the hook—and in the process spring a hundred years' worth of self-incriminating Farragut diaries from legal limbo. Frankie lunges at the job with the fury of a chain saw—tracking down the bondage queen Farragut was seeing, uncovering endless conspiracies between Farragut and the boys (and girls) downtown, getting evidence that Colleen's own lawyer is setting his client up, and, of course, falling hard for the client, who ``kissed better than most women make love.'' A low-calorie, proletarian Presumed Innocent that packs an incredible amount of detection, suspense, and fireworks into a tiny package. Only the lumbering, predictable denouement of this first novel is off the pace.