TEN LITTLE NEW YORKERS

Could the Kinkster’s 17th case be his last?

Kinky Friedman has the blues. He hasn’t had a case since The Prisoner of Vandam Street (2004). His cat has disappeared. His sidekick Ratso Sloman’s prologue to his latest case is full of dire echoes of Conan Doyle’s story “The Final Problem.” Kinky continues his one-sided chats with the absent cat and visits his sister’s animal rescue ranch outside Austin, but his ears don’t begin to twitch again until three slain New Yorkers are joined by a fourth, Robert Scalopini, who left his wallet in Kinky’s loft the night before he was killed—quite a feat, Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman glowers, for a guy who was vacationing in Vermont. The news that Scalopini had done time long ago for assaulting a young girl makes Kinky wonder whether the other victims were equally nasty. Even as he’s unearthing their unsavory pasts, the murderer is obligingly enlarging his database by providing fresh corpses. But why does all the evidence in the case—the killer’s knowledge of Kinky’s first song, his use of unlabeled Cuban cigars as a murder weapon and the phrase “too kinky” in a taunting note—point toward the Kinkster himself?

Even though the Texas Seinfeld’s dour mood dampens his scabrous humor, here’s hoping the endnote by a famous New York Times reporter, mixing elegy and hilarity, is just as inaccurate about his fate as it is about everything else.