THE BLIND TRUST KILLS

Insurance investigator Sam Gross of Queens, N.Y., and The Nirvana Contracts returns--with a more manageably plausible case and with fewer grating mannerisms (still obsessed with his Jewish nose, though). This is land fraud in Phoenix, just like for real out there in the Mafia/Big Business ""land of the symbiotic ripoff."" And also just like for real, an investigative reporter gets blown up in his car--soon after Sam, who's trying to find a loophole for the company that carried the title insurance, interviews him. By tracking the car bomb to its San Francisco origins, Sam and his new lover-sidekick, a real estate saleswoman, get the goods on the upper-crust front for the whole sordid deal. Not much in the way of mystery--Wohl follows the bombers right from the start--but only the legalese details on ""blind trusts"" sometimes keep this from being a quick, active mix of rough stuff and repartee.