When the Fat Man Sings

For part-time magician Shifty Lou Anderson, the job he is offered by world-famous tenor Fulvio Gasparini seems simple enough. Shifty, a skilled gambler, will be required to do nothing more than control the hefty opera star's gambling losses and check on Gasparini's stable of racehorses. Naturally, things do not work out that way. Shifty uncovers problems with Gasparini's stable and soon finds himself the target of a big-time crime syndicate. The pace here is frenetic and the population out of control. There are nymphomaniacs, orgies, escaped lions, hammer-wielding assailants and a confusion of other uglies, among them Hugo Mandelbaum, a Las Vegas comic with a mouth like a sewer, who subjects the reader to jokes that even the jaded Shifty finds tasteless. Murray (Tip on a Dead Crab) knows his horse racing and his opera, but the union he attempts here is unsuccessful and even offensive. At what point did AIDS become a permissible subject for quips? (October)