On Ice

The best moments in Ramus's third thriller are the scenes of prison life--not surprising, since the author is a former art dealer who did some hard time before writing his well-received Thief of Light and The Gravity of Shadows. His latest isn't as original as those art-flavored crime capers, involving instead a complicated and implausible scheme to steal and hold for ransom expensive samples of frozen sperm from top racehorses. Ben Hemmings, a builder of barns and stables for some of Atlanta's top horse breeders, gets into trouble when the Feds decide to turn his less -than scrupulous bookkeeping and his boyhood friendship with a gambler into a money-laundering charge in order to squeeze Hemmings into ratting out his old buddy. But Ben won't bend and gets a three-year-sentence from an unsympathetic judge. In the minimum-security Alabama prison, he's lucky to share a cell with a wise and relatively compassionate drug dealer called Black, who teaches him the art of survival. Rougher lessons are supplied by Rollie Shore, an elderly Jewish mobster who rules the prison. Offered a chance to get out of jail after 18 months by a devious FBI agent with a private agenda, Hemmings risks not only his own life but the safety of his increasingly desperate wife and their two young daughters in a wild scheme to go up against Shore--also soon freed from prison--and find the missing horse sperm. Readers might not buy into Ramus's tangled plot, but they should be moved by the chilling truths of his prison scenes. When Hemmings talks about daily life behind bars, surrounded by drug dealers and ""a mix of losers and sociopaths who'd done everything from robbing banks to peddling stolen military hardware,"" his voice crackles with authenticity. (June)