SPRINGER’S GAMBIT

Talk about bad luck. For years, Bay Area developer Max Shapiro has been laundering money and putting aside part of his take for his silent partner Nicky Tortino nice as pie, and now, just a few days after he’s relocated to Aspen after summoning the guts to inform Nicky T’s torpedo, Gerry Knucks, that their arrangement is over, he gets a call from the doctor telling him that his indigestion isn’t cancer after all, and that he’s going to have to live in a world with Nicky T and Gerry, though probably not for much longer. Unwilling to accept a second death sentence so soon, Max, egged on by his Mormon girlfriend Suzi Carr, asks ex–Secret Service agent Cole Springer, last seen at an Aspen piano bar, to watch his unlovely back. As Springer, already burned in a real-estate deal with Max, tries to figure out some reason he should protect this guy, local FBI agent Tobi Ryder and San Francisco visitor Jack Summers, the Bureau lounge lizard who’s still hitting on Tobi after she called it quits, are homing in on Max. So are Ray Dean Carr (evidently no relation to Suzi) and Auteen Phelps, the clueless killers Nicky T has sent to punch Max’s ticket, and Ricky Jade, the hit man slighted Chinatown mobster Kim Li has sent after Gerry.

Ripley has forsaken the Spenseresque mode of Wyatt Storme (Electric Country Roulette, 1996, etc.) for Elmore Leonard prose and plotting—expect love to blossom between Springer and Ryder—but come up with some nifty double-crosses of his own: an effervescent series debut.