BOTTOM LINER BLUES

A tenth appearance for Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police chief Mario Balzic (Sunshine Enemies, 1990, etc.)—who, here, has three problems on his hands: a woman has gotten it into her head that her husband wants to beat up his girlfriend's new boyfriend; Mario's lonely wife, Ruthie, says she'd like to dissolve their marriage contract and start all over—with Mario talking to her instead of yelling; and Myushkin, a broke Russian-American writer, is brandishing a gun and forcing Mario to listen to his diatribe against libraries that rip him off ``in direct violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments''—a diatribe against library inequities that goes on for the better part of a hundred pages. Moreover, Mario's Iwo Jima nightmare is breaking through decades of repression; and the crimes, plights, and pleas that he's confronting don't really stop so much as go on hiatus. Dialogue par excellence, and saloon philosophers aplenty, but a failure as a mystery: Do the crimes perpetrated on writers by public libraries build a plot or merely a soapbox?