THE PRISONER OF VANDAM STREET

Immured in his scruffy digs at 199B Vandam Street, Kinky Friedman, the world’s most unfocused private eye, finds himself cast in a riotous, blasphemous, politically incorrect version of Rear Window.

One minute Kinky’s finishing his third Guinness at the Corner Bistro with Mike McGovern, the journalist who helped him wrap up Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch (2002); the next, he’s on his way to the hospital with what Dr. Q. Tip Skinnipipi describes as a serious case of malaria. The doc orders the Kinkster to keep close to his bed for six weeks, watched over by his raffish Vandam Street Irregulars—sometime partner Steve Rambam, old pal Ratso Sloman, photographer Mick Brennan, visiting Australian Piers Akerman, and McGovern, who’s growing selectively and irritatingly deaf—but he can’t suppress his unerring eye for detail or his keen analytical sense or his habit of talking to his cat. So when Kinky sees a man assaulting a woman across the street at 198, he soon persuades both the Irregulars and New York’s finest that the tableau was nothing but a malarial imagining, especially since there’s no trace of the man’s or woman’s existence, and 198 Vandam has no third-floor apartment.

Not only is there less mystery than in any of Kinky’s first 15 cases—no mean feat—but the solution explains nothing, not even how Kinky came down with a malady that simply extends his trademark non sequiturs to chapter length.