THE SECOND DEADLY SIN

Far less kinky and more straightforwardly police-procedural than the bestselling First, Chief Ed ("Iron Balls") Delaney's new case—taken in retirement—is the knifemurder of that throwback titan of the artworld, Victor Maitland ("If he painted a tit, it was a tit"). Delaney and semi-recovered alcoholic sidekick Abner Boone (two retch-and-regret lapses) obnoxiously hound the standard Perry-Masonic coven of suspects: wife (frigid); mistress (drug-pushiug nympho of the society page); son (Oedipally violent); agent (heavyhandedly named Geltman); and the best friend who envied Maitland's much-proclaimed but unconvincingly novelized genius. (The descriptions of Maitland's super-realistic nudes suggest a Norman Rockwell gone groinal.) A plausible tax-fraud scheme involving falsely dated, cached canvases is uncovered, but the investigation is wrapped up by a jolly black cop's tracing of an almost-eye-witness—the undesirable Hispanic hooker who saw the culprit on the scene. So, as detection, this is ordinary-minus, but Sanders piles on the homey, sandwich sentiment (Delaney's second wife is sexy perfection) and the irresistibly vulgar-phoney NY palaver; all players—including the denizens of Sanders' ludicrously muraled art scene—come on movie-sized, invariably venal, and talking that blend of Bogart & Yiddish & Lenny Bruce spoken everywhere but in life (compare, for example, Uhnak's real-cop lingo). The end-product is unquestionably lively and as readably mindless as a padded Erie Stanley Gardner can be, but, if there are going to be five more of these time-wasters, one for every sin, a little more imagination and a lot less formula would be advisable.