The Left Hand of God

The new outing for high-ranking African-American Chicago cop Larry Cole is an ambitious but cluttered mix of clandestine politicking, crooked gambling and black magic. In rural Mississippi in 1956, a secret organization, the Human Development Institute, attempted to murder a benevolent ""she-devil."" Nearly half a century later, the institute is still around--and so is the shape-shifter, or Abo-Yorba. Now calling herself Orga Syriac, she is newly employed as a TV journalist in Chicago, and at the moment is acting as the glamorous companion to none other than Cole at a PAC dinner. An HDI agent, posing as a priest, has gone inexplicably rogue and has decided to kill all those at the dinner with well-placed explosives. Cole's son, Butch, meanwhile, is club-hopping at a trendy spot owned by Jack Carlisle, a criminal intent on blackmailing Chicago Bulls star Pete Dubcek into throwing a game. Holton, himself brass in the Chicago PD, demonstrates that a plethora of plotting--some of it quite exciting--can come very close to papering over a bland prose style. Cole, too, is dull, a wooden soul adrift in a caper where things happen for hazy reasons. (Feb.)