BUT I WOULDN'T WANT TO DIE THERE

Jenny Cain, the author's energetic, emotionally vulnerable heroine (Generous Death, etc.), ex-director of a charitable foundation in Port Frederick, Massachusetts, has lost her New York friend Carol Margolis, killed by a street mugger. Carol worked for the Hart Foundation, and now her boss wants Jenny to take over Carol's projects—an idea not happily received by Jenny's policeman husband Geof. Arriving in New York, Jenny stays in Carol's apartment, in a building full of aging eccentrics, run by Jed Goodman, 19-year-old son of the loony landlady. She meets Carol's separated husband Steve, an unprosperous musician whose Brooklyn in-laws are certain he arranged Carol's demise. Steve wants Jenny to plead his innocence to them, but that's only the start of her problems. Carol had left behind a series of unresolved Foundation tangles—heavy donor Malcolm Lloyd, threatening to sue for return of his money; a theater group waiting penniless for their inexplicably overdue grant check; and an illiteracy program run by overwrought Frenchman Andrei Bolen in the dankest of slums. Jenny takes it all on—alternating between fear of the city and its weirdos and exhilaration at its vibrant pace and inexhaustible wonders—until Carol's murderer is unmasked and other matters are resolved, including her own future career. Robust, funny, touching, and engrossing all the way: Pickard peaks here.