cover image Blood Sugar

Blood Sugar

Jim Defilippi. HarperCollins Publishers, $20 (275pp) ISBN 978-0-06-016879-7

Long Island detective Joe LaLuna, a champion solver of tough cases, gets a lulu when his high school sweetheart Audie's husband, Milton, turns up dead, apparently from a drug overdose. Though Audie found the body after attending a Chuck Berry concert with her lover (and part-time drug dealer) Chester Zumrad, Joe is unfazed--even when his partner, Winky Dink Hraska, notes that the antique milking machine and drug paraphernalia in the bedroom hint that Audie is not the girl she used to be. Joe charms the tipsy Nassau County medical examiner, Dr. Sharon Slabb (the Drab), into redoing Milton's autopsy, and finds that he was killed by insulin injected into his eye. Obsessed with proving Audie's innocence, Joe ignores police procedure and his ailing wife Madeline to shower attention on the uninterested widow. His payoff to Slabb the Drab--he gives her mother's con-man boyfriend the bum's rush--backfires wildly, and Milton's ex-partner gets Joe suspended right after Madeline is murdered, again by a needle in the eye. Only Hraska stands by his man as this wacky tale finger-pops its way to a perfect ending with no loose ends--except for the foot found in a dumpster. (Sept.)