NO SAVING GRACE

What a bulldog Matt Jacob is! Once you ask him to dig up information—this time, background about the White Avengers, whose chief, Sean Kelly, shot Hasidic leader Rabbi Dov Horowitz in the middle of a Simchas Torah celebration just before getting shot himself by ``Rambo Rabbi'' Yonah Saperstein—you just can't pull him off the case. Long after his client and longtime buddy Simon Roth and his longtime nemesis Washington Clifford, of Boston's Special Forces, have both drawn a line in the sand, Matt's still nosing out the sinister connections among Fr. Brady Collins's Keep It Green social activists, the IRA, the White Avengers, the radical Zionist group the Never Agains, and the Hasidic community (why else would Rabbi Saperstein's tormented son Yakov have reported seeing his father in meetings with Sean Kelly?). Like Philip Marlowe, Matt seems to take every case (Still Among the Living, Two Way Toll) as an invitation to look deeper inside himself. This time, what he finds there holds the whole ideological slugfest together.