MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH

After years of working no harder than his cat, Kinky Friedman is juggling three cases his private-eye buddy Steve Rambam has code-named Moe, Larry, and Curly. Moe, a search for a serial killer living in a quiet Long Island neighborhood, fizzles early on, and the mysterious Curly never gets off the ground. But Larry, the quest for the missing Dylan Weinberg, actually puts Kinky’s brain cells to work. Where would an 11-year-old autistic savant with a working vocabulary of exactly one word (“shnay”) have gone? If he was kidnapped, why hasn’t there been a ransom demand? How can a lone private eye find him when New York’s finest haven’t a clue weeks after the fact? And how soon can the Kinkster quit condoling with Dylan’s luscious half-sister Julia and start putting the moves on her? Good questions, all of them, but they can’t hold a candle to the disappearance of a three-legged cat named Lucky from the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, that slice of Texas heaven Kinky founded with pleading Nancy Parker. As Rambam points out, it should be easy to decide which is more important, a child missing in New York or a cat missing in Texas, but peripatetic Kinky manages to work both cases, managing enough detection to offer his peerless hallmark persiflage some serious competition.

For the rest, it’s the same reliable formula as Kinky’s first 14 (Steppin’ on a Rainbow, 2001, etc.): rude banter, honest laughs, a Zen-like approach to crime and punishment, and not a trace of Curly.