TROPICAL DEPRESSION

The newest shingle out on Key West's crowded shamus row belongs to Billy Knight, a former cop who quit to become a charter fishing guide after a hostage standoff left his wife and daughter dead. Billy refuses to go back to LA when his former colleague, black desk jockey Roscoe McAuley, asks him to hunt down the sniper who shot his son Hector to prevent him from keeping order during the post -- Rodney King riots; but when Roscoe himself is killed in a Hollywood alley, Billy rouses himself to return. In no time at all (courtesy of a convenient eyewitness, a talkative thug, and some inspired guesswork), he's figured out that the McAuleys were executed by a paramilitary white-supremacist group called the Brothers of the Righteous Sword, and then, presto! he's going mano à mano with the Biggest Brother, a comic-book rogue cop (""some kind of genetic accident"") who makes Darryl Gates look like Will Rogers. Imagine Billy's surprise when the key to the case turns out to be a glamour-puss nurse he met on the plane from Miami. All the subtlety and complexity of a TV pilot with the middle third squeezed out.