Angels in Heaven

This fourth Vic Daniel mystery by Canadian expatriate Pierce is the U.S. hardcover debut of this laconic and grumbling, brutally funny, 6 7 Southern California detective. A master of off-center characterization and the oddball narrative view, Pierce conjures up low-rent coastal locales filled with Vietnamese restaurants, with strains of poor-gumshoe blues in the background. Early cases involve hiking across town to establish an alibi for a client and helping an aspiring basketball star hide a point-shaving past. The action picks up when a boyhood chum in a Mexican jail pleads for help. Vic, his multi-purpose gofer, punkette/poet Sara Silvetti, and the ace conman Benny the Boy pack their bags, their Montezuma's Revenge medicine and their fake passports and head south. Madcap storytelling and nutso types whose smart mouths run in overdrive make up for dated aspects of the five-year-old plot: riffs on Apple II computers and Valley talk don't play as well as they used to, nor is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hitting the basket anymore, as he does here. Readers for whom Ross Thomas can't write enough will grin slyly with Pierce, even so. (Aug.)