VENGEANCE

Not content with creating Toby Peters, Insp. Porfiry Rostnikov, and Abe Lieberman, Kaminsky launches a new series about Lew Fonseca, a process server who drifted to Sarasota after a car killed his wife in Chicago. Though he’s not a licensed private eye, Lew, who lives and works out of an office right behind a Dairy Queen, agrees to find people sometimes because anybody can ask questions. His first recorded case is a tale of two runaways. Real-estate mogul Carl Sebastian is willing to pay anything to get his beautiful young wife Melanie back; Beryl Tree, who’s followed her daughter Adele, 14, from Kansas to Florida, offers Lew fifty dollars, though she might go as high as a hundred. In between burgers and Blizzards, Lew pieces together Adele’s story, and it’s not pretty: an abusive father, a lowlife pimp, a quick sale of the fresh young thing to major sleazeball John Pirannes. In danger from both her father and the man he’s sold her to, Adele is obviously in deep trouble. But it’s hard to concentrate on finding her when Sebastian is constantly breathing down Lew’s neck, even though everything about Melanie’s disappearance—the trail she’s left, the stories her friends tell Lew, a meeting in which she begs him not to find her for another three days’spells setup. Though both cases seem predictable, Kaminsky pulls off a climactic surprise for each one. The biggest news, though, is his depressed little Lancelot in Levi’s, who’s worth at least a dozen more installments.