Hot Tickets: A Malone Thriller

Malone is a smart-alecky private eye in Jersey City, a former FBI agent and one-time Jesuit seminarian who has specialized in homicide cases ever since his wife was killed in Jersey Tomatoes, his first case. In earlier years, Malone was also a wrestler, an experience that stands him in good stead here when a big-time wrestling promoter hires him to track down the threatening letters sent to a rising-star wrestler named Samson. At the same time Malone's secretary asks him to help out her tenant, a young woman who strips at nightright down to her hot ticketsto pay for her daytime studies for the Episcopalian priesthood. Eventually the two cases come together for Malone, but not before Samson's bountiful ringside assistant Delilah is crushed to death in a wrestlng hold, or before the holy stripper's boss is executed, or her financial arrangement with a hot-shot lawyer of questionable ethics is revealed, nor before Malone suffers repeated and varied attempts on his own life. The action is fast and furious and the dialogue equallyand often confusinglyso. The ambiance of Jersey City combines with that of wrestling's serio-comic world to surprisingly piquant effect. (November 20)