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[Charlie Bradshaw], himself, is engaged in a long-standing struggle with his own unfortunate circumstances. In the eyes of his relatives, all pillars of the community in Saratoga, N.Y., he is a clear failure. Although he is a born detective, a man of enormous curiosity and tenacity, he failed to sustain a career in the Saratoga police department. The constraints of discipline and of a chain of command were too much for him. So he put out a shingle as a private detective in partnership with [Victor Plotz], a retired cop. But their agency is not prospering, which explains why in this book Bradshaw is serving a house detective in a hotel, and Plotz has a part-time job taking pictures of tourists at the same hotel. Mike Gallagher, the detective in the latest book, is the acting head of the homicide squad for the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department. The department frowns on its officers engaging in amorous activity with married women, and that's just what Gallagher is doing when a mass murder is committed just across the street from his girlfriend's home. In the early portion of the book, the plot deals with Gallagher's efforts to minimize the embarrassing potential of that happenstance. Later he finds himself deep in an investigation that involves murder, drugs and high-level corruption, and that's the main problem with the book. The plot is so complex that the reader 3/8Photo - [Stephen Dobyns] sometimes gets lost in the tangle. The eighth book in Gregory McDonald's Fletch series, entitled \"Fletch, Too\" (Warner, $15.95) sends McDonald's young reporter hero, Irwin Fletcher, off on an African safari in search of his father. The characterization has moments of its old verve, as when Fletch and his bride arrive in Africa equipped with full regalia for a ski vacation. But, for the most part, the book is to humor as the brew delivered by a used tea bag is to flavor.

When Vermont natives refer to their rocky soil as \"bony,\" they are not talking about a skeleton buried in the back 40. But that's what Joe Gunther, the flinty Brattleboro cop in Archer Mayor's rugged police procedurals, digs up in THE SKELETON'S KNEE (Mysterious Press/Warner, $18.95), on the land of a reclusive farm tenant who has recently died of an old, unexplained gunshot wound. A prosthetic kneecap found with the human bones is not only a work of art -- \"beautifully designed, immaculately crafted and surgically precise\" -- but also the sole clue to the hermit's shady past, which calls for the kind of deep and detailed investigative work that Gunther does so well. There's a lot of huggermugger, to be sure, in this contrived plot about a fascistic religious group that has holed up in a lonesome outpost of Nevada. The mind also boggles a bit at [Neal Carey]'s simplistic and foolhardy assignment to pass himself off as a ranch hand so he can infiltrate the military training camp of this kooky outfit and rescue a kidnapped child. Still, the scenery is splendid, and there is something irresistible about the good-natured efforts of this city slicker to turn himself into a real \"rootin'-tootin', two-fisted drinkin', barroom-brawlin' cowboy.\" And whenever the epic tone of \"Way Down on the High Lonely\" threatens to climb way up on its high horse, Mr. [Don Winslow] has the good sense to send Neal to some homely hot spot like the Filly Ranch or Phil and Margie's Country Cabaret for a restorative dose of local color. Darned if it doesn't work like a charm every time.

In ''Hades'' the plotting is fairly traditional, down to the expected encounter between killer and investigator. But it's all in the telling, and the pseudonymous author tells her story in a kind of English that has not been around since the days of Oscar Wilde. Most of the characters speak in rounded periods, often with a touch of malicious wit. '' 'Vashti's?' said Ragwort, with austere disapproval. 'Vashti's has a most unsavoury reputation. I have heard it spoken of as a place frequented by females of unnatural propensity, seeking companions in disgraceful conduct.' '' To which Ragwort's friend Selena answers, ''I have heard it spoken of as an agreeable little establishment where single women may enjoy one another's company in relaxed and convivial surroundings.'' The narrator and amateur detective of this book is a legal scholar named Hilary Tamar. Basically he is a historian, and he describes his profession as ''speaking ill of the dead.'' He is questioning a young man who is terribly impatient with his parents and says some ill-advised things about them, concluding with the statement ''Parents can be very difficult.'' Tamar has only one comment: ''They have suffered a traumatic experience - you must make allowances.'' The twist is in the young Rus-sian's activities. He forms an ''army'' just as the Mafia has done, and when a hit contract is put out on him, he is ready. The goons sent to kill him are slaughtered. In the meantime, an intelligence officer in the New York City Police Department has been concentrating on the activities of the Mob, and he gets involved in the Russian tie-up. The F.B.I. also enters the case, managing to bollix things up beautifully. (Has any crime novelist in recent years had anything good to say about the F.B.I.?) Basically this is more a ''Godfather'' kind of book than a novel about the Russian hotshot. It is well written. Mr. [Bob Leuci] is a very good technician who would appear to know a good deal about organized crime in New York. He takes us backstage into Mafia councils in Brooklyn and Little Italy, gives us a good idea of the kind of people the mobsters are and has organized the elements into a coherent plot. Of course, there is a good deal of action. And there is a good deal about the Russian mentality, climaxed by a meeting in San Diego between the Russian and his former mentor in Moscow. Everything rings true in ''Odessa Beach.'' You won't be bored.

[...]the \"virtual\" of the title is something of a red herring: the term appears only sparingly, primarily as a synonym for \"imagined,\" as when \"the novel . . . allows readers to catch sight of a series of hypothetical, or virtual, worlds\" (132). While David Summers's notion of \"double distance\" in painting provokes a notable variety of semi-detachment (Summers qtd. in Plotz 9)-the image presents itself as both a colorful surface and a depicted social world-Plotz focuses on the narrative dimensions of the artists' work, where the vital tension between \"ephemeral instants and longer arcs\" again summons up the episodic, a quality that likewise distinguishes Robert Browning's monologues (97). Why not six or eight?\" The governing concept is submerged in the quality of the author's mind, and the manifold understanding and pleasure it provokes.