MONTEZUMA'S MAN

Now that his right-hand-man Manfred Coen is dead, New York Police Commissioner Isaac Sidel (The Good Policeman, etc., etc.) recruits a new lieutenant, Joe Barbarossa, an Irish/Italian/Nez PercÇ on the outs with Isaac's Justice Department scourge Frederic LeComte ever since he killed Montezuma, a doper turned DEA undercover agent. Posing as the Black Stocking Twins, the Pink Commish and his new sidekick begin knocking off mob social clubs around town—only to find themselves caught in a crossfire between Sal Rubino, current lover of Isaac's old flame Margaret Tolstoy, and mobster Jerry DiAngelis, both of whom are fighting to recover a fabled group of puppets used to smuggle heroin. As usual in Charyn, there's much, much more: Joe falls in love with Isaac's much-married daughter Marilyn the Wild; Montezuma turns up alive after all; and Isaac can move against Mayor Becky Karp's corrupt administration only by entering the mayoral race himself. How will the campaign go? Tune in for the fourth installment of the ``New Isaac Quartet.'' Not for the fainthearted—each of Charyn's baroque anti- procedural fantasies is required reading for all the others—but another bracing immersion in the most sustained attempt to date to create a personal mythology out of a police hero.