BURIED LIES

The day after Kieran Lenahan's pro shop at the Milton Country Club burns to the ground—taking with it an adjoining ``monkey house,'' leaving a dozen Latino restaurant workers homeless, and a firefighter dead from a suspicious exploding projectile—the news gets even darker: Ian MacEwan, a.k.a. Jackie Mack, the nonpareil caddie who was scheduled to shepherd Kieran through the vicissitudes of the PGA championship at nearby Winged Foot, is crushed under the wheels of an Amtrak train. Suicide, say several witnesses to the death, so hard-nosed Msgr. Barry Neumann refuses to give a funeral mass for Jackie, who's being kept so long above ground that the funeral director is starting to worry. Meantime, the local cops aren't idle: They're busy arresting Kieran for torching his own shop for the insurance. And Kieran's own lawyer, a mindless scrapper, has insisted on a hearing that'll fall on the second day of the PGA. So now Kieran, one reluctant amateur sleuth (Local Knowledge, 1995), has two compelling reasons to get to the bottom of the mystery pronto: to change Msgr. Neumann's mind about Jackie before the clock ticks down on the ripening corpse, and to clear himself in time to hit the links, even if it means revealing some home truths about the man he's trying to reconcile posthumously to the Holy Mother Church. Kieran does both handsomely, with surprising grace and style, even though the case winds down so abruptly that golf fans (whose ranks Daly is bound to enlarge) will find more to cheer than mystery mavens.