DRIVE-BY

The Omaha police think Darius LeClerc, gunned down for being in the wrong place at the wrong place, was just another random casualty of gang violence. But the teenager's uncle, Elmo Lammers, is convinced that Darius wouldn't have been in that part of town so late at night without some good reason. It isn't long, then, before he and his war buddy Nebraska, the sometime shamus missing from the scene since The Naked Eye (1990), tie the boy into the warfare between the local versions of the Crips and the Bloodsand persuade themselves that he was killed on orders from the Bloods' Top Prez, Wizard (nÇ Gerard Jones). There's no evidence, however, and Wizard wouldn't sit still to get arrested if there were, so they spend the second half of this earnest, overdrawn saga setting a trap for Wizard that's satisfying but not particularly inventive. Less whodunit than howcatchem, with a hero whose long sabbatical has mainly sobered him from an inveterate wiseguy to a gasbag anti-gang moralist.