EL BRONX

This ninth in the idiosyncratic, quasi-mystical crime series beatifying New York Police Chief/Commissioner/Mayor Isaac Sidel— his most recent manifestation was as mayor-elect in Little Angel Street (1994)—tells of El Caballo's crusade to reclaim the gang- blasted Bronx from economic and human disaster. Buzzing in his helicopter like a baggy-suited bumblebee from a Yankees' strike crisis to a project shoot-out to a Gracie Mansion meeting of Merlin—the Mayor's own all-city educational project for slum and Sutton Place children—Isaac senses bad influences coming from strange places. The baseball czar's estranged wife is being stalked by a hooded mystery man; sent to kill her, he eventually becomes her lover (as, later, does Isaac). Also, a shadowy group of assassins has decimated the street gangs; their dead leaders are memorialized with spray paint on the walls along Featherbed Lane by juvenile offender/artist Angel Carpenteros—known as Alyosha to Isaac and his hand-picked police cadre, the gang-graduate Apaches, most of whom have been corrupted beyond the Mayor's staunchly liberal dreams. Alyosha is chaste sweetheart to Marianna Storm, cookie-baking, Amex-card-carrying heiress of the baseball czar's fortune. Meanwhile, the police, the governor, and the street thugs are—thanks to drug- and real-estate money—all in bed together. Charyn's rich, spicy prose makes this aggressively romantic fable palatable but—be warned—riding his juggernaut plot may bring on vertigo.