Bliss: A Lenny Bliss Mystery

Lenny Bliss seems to be losing touch with his life. It wasn't that Bliss's marriage was falling apart - it had already fallen. But the pieces had arranged themselves so neatly on the floor, he and his wife decided to leave them there, and they and the kids just walked around them. His daughters were becoming more sullen every day. His stand-up-comic wife was preoccupied with her Lenny Bruce-meets-June Cleaver comedy routine. "One morning I woke up and there was a hooker in our bed. I tell my husband the cop, 'Honey, you've got to learn how not to take your work home with you.'" Then a body is found in a walkup on Manhattan's East Side. Type: dead. Female. Thirty-two. What at first blush looks like a case of a working girl killed by a john turns into something infinitely more complicated and much closer to Bliss's heart. When another girl is murdered, the trail of lingerie leads Bliss to Brighton Beach, where he has to deal with the dark world of the Russian mob before he can solve the case. For readers who like the notion of a T. S. Eliot-loving Jewish detective who chooses to live right smack down in the middle of Gotham, for fans of Donald Westlake, this highly literate mystery debut delivers on the promise inherent in its namesake.