BLOOD MONEY

Jane Whitefield usually makes people disappear (The Face-Changers, 1998, etc.), but this time it’s money: mob money that prompts La Cosa Nostra to chase Native American Jane all over the country in a terrifically plotted nail-biter. When trying to explain her remarkable talent for aiding clients to elude the ill-disposed, Jane often credits her Senecan forebears, so many of them expert trackers (and un-trackers). Be that as it may, she’s world-class at the vanishing act’so good that by now the process has become addictive. Thus, despite those promises to her beloved husband, Dr. Carey McKinnon, few Whitefield fans will expect her to say no when 18-year-old Rita Shalford asks for help. Waiflike Rita kept house in Miami for Bernie Lupus, ostensible owner of a property that in reality belongs to a “Family” consortium. Waiflike in his own right (though 70), Bernie was for years the mob’s money-minder. Now, clinging together for support, he and Rita are on the run because the LCN (La Cosa Nostra) has grown nervous about the booty and distrustful of its minder. Through a friend, they’ve come to Jane. Not only do they want to disappear, they want that mountain of money wrested from the control of the wicked. But how? What can be done to ten billion dollars to remove it permanently from organized evil-doers? Easy, Jane says. Give it to organized good-doers, the Red Cross and hundreds upon hundreds of other charities, thereby chilling the blood of all self-respecting capos. Well, not so easy, actually, but the fun is in how it gets done, and in Jane’s elegant razzle-dazzle, as again and again the mob grabs at her slender form only to come up clutching thin air. Compulsively readable. If Jane seems to know more about everything than anybody else, so be it. You’ll like it that way.