Jitter Joint

Delirium tremens turns to trembling fear in this fast, tense fiction debut by Swindle, a three-time Pulitzer Prize- winner for newspaper editing. Under pressure from his boss, Captain Bill Barrick, and from his disaffected wife, hard-drinking homicide detective Jeb Quinlin finds himself off his Dallas beat and reluctantly drying out in a fancy AA clinic. Jeb's road to recovery is diverted, though, when the members of his therapy group (run by the loathsome Dr. Wellman Bergoff), one by one, turn up literally dead drunk. The AA slogans scrawled across the victims' corpses--""Our lives had become unmanageable"" or ""God grant me the serenity""--cause Jed to suspect an inside job. The violence escalates when Barrick puts him on the case, a move that threatens to push the detective off the wagon. Swindle (Trespasses: Portrait of a Serial Rapist) sweats his hero past multiple threats in a plot steeped in AA ambiance--perhaps too deeply for some readers' taste--without losing a suspenseful edge. Car chases and fight scenes are film-clip clear while goofy characters gel in a credible story with an ending that points, happily, to a possible series. Agent, Janet Wilkins Manus. (Mar.)