FREQUENT FLYER

Friedman, country-music-singer-turned-detective-hero of Greenwich Killing Time, A Case for Lone Star, and When the Cat's Away, takes on neo-Nazis--in another tale whose breezy stream of ethnic slurs and in-jokes will confirm the lowest prejudices of Gotham-bashers everywhere. Called to the funeral of his old Peace Corps friend John Morgan in Cleveland, sharp-eyed Kinky observes that the stiff isn't Morgan at all, a fact nobody else seems to notice. What happened to the John Morgan that Kinky knew in the jungles of Borneo? His disappearance from Argentina sends his friend Carmen Cohen, a hot Latin whose nipples are ""harder than Japanese arithmetic,"" to find Kinky in New York, but Carmen is kidnapped from the Pierre Hotel by a pair of large blond boys. Even after recovering Carmen and finding the blond boys decapitated in a Bayonne warehouse, Kinky, together with his friends McGovern the reporter and Ratso the National Lampoon editor, takes a hundred pages to connect her abductors to Morgan; demonic old Nazi Wilhelm Stengal; Carmen's missing father; and the five skinheads who attack the Kinkster--all of them spoiling his reveries of ""the golden days of innocence and truth when Mike would vomit on the head of the woman at the next table and I would threaten to stick my fork in the waitress's eye."" The writing outparodies S.J. Perelman at his wildest except when Friedman slips up--""Could this increasingly grotesque puzzle reach back almost fifty years in time and across the length and breadth of three continents?""--and takes his plot seriously. A concluding note credits the title to the author's five-year-old niece. She may have had a hand in the plotting and writing as well.