Dance in the Street

Los Angeles cab driver Solomon Priester wants to be a full-time PI, but his entry into the field isn't quite as he might have hoped. He finds himself a suspect in murder after giving a jumpy young woman clutching a manila folder a ride to the Valley. The next morning, two homicide cops with no qualms about roughing up black cabbies show up at his door to inform him that she's dead and that a tip indicates she was last seen with Priester. A basketball-playing chum and police detective Kevin Carter supplies Priester with some details--the woman was tortured and strangled--and help on the quiet, but Priester's own investigation initially turns up fewer answers than questions (how did the murdered woman, who was from an affluent family, end up working for a telephone-sex outfit?) and problems (his apartment is searched and trashed; then his cab is blown up with an acquaintance inside). In this auspicious debut LeMone (who drives a taxi in L.A.) contrives a sinister undercurrent for the urban landscape he knows so well, and Priester is an intelligent but fallible tough guy with a poetic bent. (Mar.)