The Dewey Decimal System

Terrorist outrages committed on Valentine's Day and a superflu epidemic have devastated New York City, whose population is now about 800,000, in film music composer Larson's less than stellar debut, the first in a series. The quirky narrator, a hygiene freak who can't remember his given name, runs errands for Manhattan DA Daniel Rosenblatt, a crime lord rather than a law enforcement officer. Rosen-blatt has nicknamed the narrator Dewey Decimal, because Decimal is obsessed with reorganizing the books in the main branch of the New York Public Library, which no longer has a working computer catalogue. The loathsome Rosenblatt dispatches Decimal on various unsavory errands, including "quieting" Yakiv Shapsko, a Ukrainian community leader. But when Decimal arrives at Shapsko's home in Queens, he encounters instead the man's attractive Latvian wife, Iveta, with whom he begins a complex and twist-filled relationship. Unfortunately, that relationship fails to engage, and violence too often substitutes for plot coherence in this dystopian view of a future Big Apple. (May)