SIDEWALK SAINT

A car thief–turned-agent for Florida Child Protective Services defends an 11-year-old girl from a wide array of predators.

There’s nothing like a gun in your face to wake you up from a dream about your Aunt Shayna’s brisket, as Foggy Moscowitz discovers one morning in 1976. Nelson Roan, the man behind the gun, has broken out of prison to find his daughter, Etta, and he needs help from Foggy. Fry’s Bay is a long way from Brooklyn, where Foggy grew up, and his current job for the state under the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act is a big change from his former career of boosting cars. But it’s Foggy’s way of making amends for his criminal past. The next morning, Roan is gone, but Foggy’s still determined to find Etta, who has an eidetic memory, apparently knows something that a good many other people would like to know, and has been adopted by a couple who may not have her best interests at heart. A few secret messages from Etta, including one on her dog’s collar, lead Foggy to the child, who’s a person of such interest to mobsters from both Manhattan and Montreal as well as a couple of dirty cops and the FBI that Foggy decides to stash her with his friend John Horse, the tribal boss of the local Seminoles. Added to a flourishing marijuana trade, a casino venture, Etta’s father’s recent murder of the doctor who treated Etta’s mother, a switch of identities in the local hospital, and the possibility that at least two of the people in the fray aren’t who they say they are is the ongoing mystery of what Etta knows that puts her life at such risk. For all his craftiness, it’s hard work for Foggy, even with Aunt Shayna’s intervention, to stay one step ahead in his brisk and wryly funny fourth caper (Icepick, 2018, etc.).

No one can con a con like an ex-con with a good heart and even better friends.