SILKY

Mr. Rosten didn't write The Joys of Yiddish, you should excuse the expression, for nothing--so if he's going to write a detective story, it's going to be ""a whodunit with more cockamamy surprises than hit the shlemiel on his wedding night who didn't know his doll was a snakecharmer. . . . ""Well, maybe not that many surprises, but narrator Silky Pincus, private eye, does get mighty involved once blonde, gentile heiress Kimberley Marsh hires him to figure out who's following her. It all has to do with Kimberley's complicated will and her bisexual brother and his gambling debts in Trinidad and her greedy stepfather and cocaine smuggling and Chinatown. . . . Anyway before it's over, Silky will have eaten many a pastrami on rye, felled many a foe, and loved and lost Kimberley; and Rosten will have run the gamut from silly to vulgar (""vulgar shmulgar"") and back again. Some solid yucks, the kind a little of which go a long way; so only a few readers will plotz, but a good number will certainly smile--and make use of Silky's glossary of Yiddish in the back. (""That don't bother me, though I have to admit I thought Glossary is the name of a furniture polish."")