SPECIAL VICTIMS

An intense, undernourished psychodrama about a Chicago cop on the trail of the Collector, a contract killer of unwilling organ-donors. Actually, there are three stories here. In the first, Lt. Tony Tulio, widowed head of Special Victims (``dead people who got money''), bucks the corruption in Homicide and tries to talk public defender Marian Hannerty back into bed as he stalks the Collector, whose existence nobody believes in but him. Meanwhile, Marian's lover, rich, successful gallery owner Paul Harris, finally gets her into his own bed—a tryst sweetened by Harris's afterglow over the young woman whose body he's just dumped outside the hospital where mobster Arturo Alleo's daughter is dying of liver failure. When Sophia Alleo rejects the new liver and dies on the operating table, her enraged father goes after the Collector, but finds that his go-between—ex-pug Lenny Roman—is too loyal and too stupid to give up his name. And in this corner, Chicago's new Homicide detective, Jake Phillips, gets disgusted with his racist partner Jerry Moore and demands a transfer to Special Victims, where Tulio, who won the kid's admiration by decking Moore, is just waiting to warn him off before his own career goes up in smoke. (Don't hold your breath waiting for Jake to come back into the story.) First-novelist Gaitano sets the scene with authentically acrid Chicago cop atmosphere and an expert portrait of his burnt-out lawman, but his Collector (``he was not a psychotic, nor was he a serial killer. He killed for the art of it'') seems to come out of a different world, redolent of lending libraries and preadolescent fantasies.