STREET MONEY

"What Ben Cosicki was doing getting himself dead in the sarge's club, nobody could figure," and so the death of Cosicki—aka Benny Lunch— kicks off this brisk and entertaining new series. Benny is a political fixer with deep ties within Philadelphia's Redmonton district, where banks have history going back to the Revolutionary War but the train factory has been closed for years, where jazz dives rub walls with black evangelical churches and people know people. Someone in this tangled web of connections knows why Benny died, and Andrea "Andy" Cosicki determines to find the answers behind her father's death. Benny has used his contacts to get his daughter a job on the Philadelphia Press. There, she finds unexpected help in the person of the tabloid's veteran obituary columnist, N.S. Ladderback. This odd couple—feisty, athletic cub reporter combined with the aged, slow-moving thinker who hates to leave his immaculate desk—offers a pairing much like Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe. As Andy runs around and tussles with the bad guys, Ladderback uses his knowledge of the city's past to point her in the right directions. Besides clearly knowing the ins and outs of Philly, Kent (Under the Boardwalk; Down by the Sea), an award-winning New York Times correspondent, has fun with the newspaper milieu. Readers are sure to want to know how Ladderback picked up his agoraphobia and see what new messes Andy gets into—in what one hopes will be a long series. (Oct. 14)