ROGUE'S JUSTICE

``Bank on it,'' sometime Channel 3 newsman Michael Carolina had said when investigative producer Lilly Simmons asked him to come back as he sailed off into the sunset at the end of Rogue's Isles (1995). But who thought the hook for his return would be finding out who plowed Lilly into a smothering snowbank? With scarcely a clue what tip took Lilly down to Providence's Waterplace in the middle of a snowstorm, Carolina can rely on only one bedrock truth: Everybody in the nation's smallest state is covering up for someone else. When he traces the anonymous caller who told him Lilly's death was suspicious to the Medical Examiner's office, the tipster gets smeared and fired. When he leans on the Providence Director of Personnel to explain how the city hired a convicted felon to plow the city streets, she's history, and soon the felon is, too, snowed under in his own way by smiling Mayor Joey Giovannetti. Underneath all the surface stench is a pizzeria where the oven got really hot, a Medical Examiner who doesn't feel the need to do his own postmortems, and a thick pad of habeas corpus writs that make ``life sentence in Providence'' into an oxymoron. But don't look too closely at the ramshackle plot; just assume that the entire establishment's up to its neck in reptiles, and you won't be far off. Briody is a lot better at setting up his criminous targets than at knocking them down (after all, with target opportunities like this, who could miss?). Even so, it's a pleasure spending a second merry term with the felons who run Rhode Island.