Jimmy McShane is the narrative consciousness of The Game of Thirty, relating the action as it occurs in a kind of continuous present tense that Kotzwinkle has often used skillfully in earlier books. Raised in the legendary tough district of New York's Hell's Kitchen, he and his best friend (now a "knight of the NYPD") grew up quickly in an ambience of gang rivalries, his father a devout Catholic "in it up to his ass with the Mob," his streetwise education conducted by Willy the Wire. McShane sensed intuitively that he was "born to solve mysteries," joining the Air Force where he worked as a security officer. He is an ex-smoker, exdrinker, formerly married, formerly affianced, now unattached but very attracted to Ann Henderson, as well as to Temple Rennseler, who has hired him to try to find out who murdered her father. He takes his work very...