DEAD FOLKS

Will anybody ever bring avenging mob princess Helen Sedlacek and her lover, contract killer Joe Service, to book for the murders of Detroit crime boss Carmine Busoni and Mario Soper, the hit man sent to Butte to kill them? This installment of their continuing saga finds them split up—Helen's cooling her heels in the Butte jail as Joe, barely recovered from a gunshot to the head, has taken his inexperienced, willing nurse Cate Yoder to Salt Lake City in search of the swag he dimly remembers stashing- -with Helen's nemesis, Detroit's Det. Sgt. Fang Mulheisen (Deadman, 1994, etc.), still playing Achilles to her tortoise. Helen, knowing there's no charge they can hold her on, is already dreaming of Salt Lake City, where Joe's battling Tongan mobsters as he dreams his own dreams of money-laundering scams starring wholesale used-car deals or wholesale hospices for AIDS patients who can die and leave their alleged, squeaky-clean fortunes to Joe. Meantime, the pot continues to boil merrily for Heather Bloom, foiled in her last attempt to kill Helen, who wheedles her way into elderly rancher Grace Garland's heart as she awaits her next shot, and for titanic Humphrey DiEbola, the new Detroit kingpin with a taste for chiles. Jackson's six Mulheisen chronicles have created something unique: a comic soap opera in which the murderously funny writing skewers the characters so surely that nobody can budge an inch, unless you count dying as movement. (Author tour)