FIXED IN HIS FOLLY

Turbo-powered attorney Harriet (Happy) Mallory hires Chicago p.i. Malachy Foley because she thinks it's time she got in touch with the son she put up for adoption 30 years ago. Actually, though, her timing couldn't be worse: The unappealing forgotten son, Father Kevin Cunningham (``call me Father''), is a deeply disturbed alcoholic who's being driven to the edge by a series of murderous attacks on people a lot closer to him than his birth mother. The violence isn't random, thinks Foley, who's come under attack himself from an unlovely pair who don't want him ``even close to happy''; somebody's trying to get revenge on Father for something he did (killing a pregnant parish secretary in a car crash? exposing himself to an altar boy?) to wreck another life. But can Foley figure out who the aggrieved party is before Father runs out of friends and relations and has to take the next bullet himself? A tangled, moody debut with a decidedly dark view of religion and the religious (the author is a former Jesuit priest): a solid, sordid job of work.