Timothy's Game

Timothy Cone, Sanders's shabbily dressed, tough-talking, razor-witted Wall Street dick, is back at his special game in three dazzlingly plotted stories that might have been subtitled (to borrow the words of Cone's feisty girlfriend and boss): ``The things people will do for the almighty buck.'' Among the colorful players, , there's the resilient daughter of a gangster who not only knows how to combine insider trading with running her late father's garbage disposal business, but who, with Cone's help, learns how to keep the business out of the grasping hands of mobsters and stay alive; the financial tycoon so universally hated it takes a Cone to pick the person who really ``offed'' him from among all those who wanted to; and the case of the mysterious rise in the stock of a Chinese food company, the investigation of which puts Cone in the crossfire of murderous Chinese gangs. What Sanders (The Anderson Tapes, The Fourth Deadly Sin, The Timothy Files) doesn't know about insider trading, crooked takeover bids, blackmail, greenmail and the way cops and racketeers think and talk is nobody's business. And he knows quite a bit about human psychology, too. Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Mystery Guild alternates. (July)