The painful past resurfaces for investigator Lew Fonesca when he agrees to check into the disappearance of a client's wife. 25,000 first printing. Lew Fonseca was a process server for the state attorney's office in Cook County, Illinois. Then his wife died, and Lew, unable to bear living his former life without his mate, drove south until his car died in a Dairy Queen parking lot in Sarasota, Florida. Now he squeezes out a living as a freelance process server and avoids his emotions as much as possible. One of his lawyer's wealthy clients, Carl Sebastian, hires Lew to conduct a discreet inquiry into the disappearance of his trophy wife, Melanie. At the same time Lew picks up the search for a teenage runaway who may have been sold to the local vice king by her abusive father. The first episode in a new series by Edgar-winner Kaminsky is a very satisfying, exciting read. Fonseca is a decent, troubled man hoping to recover his emotional focus, in part by forcing himself to care more for his clients than he does for himself. Kaminsky surrounds him with a unique, carefully drawn cast of secondary characters, including a seventysomething former rancher who is handy with guns and lives by the code of the Old West. Readers will be demanding the sequel before they've finished the debut. Wes Lukowsky Not content with creating Toby Peters, Insp. Porfiry Rostnikov, and Abe Lieberman, Kaminsky launches a new series about Lew Fonseca, a process server who drifted to Sarasota after a car killed his wife in Chicago. Though he's not a licensed private eye, Lew, who lives and works out of an office right behind a Dairy Queen, agrees to find people sometimes because anybody can ask questions. His first recorded case is a tale of two runaways. Real-estate mogul Carl Sebastian is willing to pay anything to get his beautiful young wife Melanie back; Beryl Tree, who's followed her daughter Adele, 14, from Kansas to Florida, offers Lew fifty dollars, though she might go as high as a hundred. In between burgers and Blizzards, Lew pieces together Adele's story, and it's not pretty: an abusive father, a lowlife pimp, a quick sale of the fresh young thing to major sleazeball John Pirannes. In danger from both her father and the man he's sold her to, Adele is obviously in deep trouble. But it's hard to concentrate on finding her when Sebastian is constantly breathing down Lew's neck, even though everything about Melanie's disappearancethe trail she's left, the stories her friends tell Lew, a meeting in which she begs him not to find her for another three daysspells setup. Though both cases seem predictable, Kaminsky pulls off a climactic surprise for each one. The biggest news, though, is his depressed little Lancelot in Levi's, who's worth at least a dozen more installments. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. ...staked with vivid characters and plenty of local color... -- The New York Times Book Review , Marilyn Stasio