MURDER BY THE NUMBERS

Legendary cop Elliot Ness, who's become a fixture in Collins's fact-based novels (Bullet Proof, 1989, etc.), goes up against Cleveland's Mayfield Road gang, the brainchild of two cousins, Black Sal Lombardi and Angelo Scalise, who've muscled in on the formerly black East Side numbers racket in 1938. The Mayfield gang runs a tight ship—interlopers are terrorized and informants executed—and it's only with the help of compromised Officer Toussaint Johnson, an old intimate of numbers banker Rufus Murphy, that Ness is able to break its grip on the city. Gritty details of interracial crime and punishment (the crime inevitably more rousing) enliven this otherwise routine Black Mask pastiche.