RITTENHOUSE SQUARE

The title is a patch of top dog real estate in the City of Brotherly Love where the young narrator is on his way to becoming, in upward mobile leaps, bounds and two steps, a Philadelphia lawyer. (The book is a good bet to become a Hollywood special.) Ben Buffer, ex-scholarship boy, has always aimed at a safe partnership at Conyers and Dean. But he wants to be a good lawyer too. Through an easy-to-read and easy-to-understand first person, Ben Butler boy lawyer tells it like it is at the not always tidy top: he's unresistingly hurled at the newly divorced sister-in-law of a senior partner, he gradually discovers his chief mentor's deterioration and duplicity, he spends a part of one month assigned to the City Defender's staff (some excellent trial scenes for the courtroom buff). . . . Anyway, it's sliced or spliced--Rittenhouse Square is good, tasteful, technicolor storytelling.