SCAVENGER REEF

What a bittersweet day for Key West painter Augie Silver's friends when his shipwreck death sends the value of their Silver canvases skyrocketing—and what an awkward moment when he turns up alive after all. While you're waiting to see who's trying to kill Augie and whether he'll stay dead this time, you get to watch the painter's matey enough intimates crack under financial pressure (Ray Yates's gambling debts, the lure of lifetime security for short- tempered fishing guide Jimmy Gibbs, Robert Natchez's escape from cadging grants to write poetry, Augie's New York agent Claire Steiger's dream of a legendary score) to reveal a sorry shoal of makeweights and parasites. That revelation of amiable spiritual bankruptcy is the leading pleasure—and a considerable one—of this soufflÇ of a crime novel from the author of Florida Straits (1992).