A Ragged Plot — Richard Barth

It's a lovely garden, this formerly desolate lot off Broadway, now burgeoning with the healthy green of growing things. Too bad the kindly old Puerto Rican man who had started it wouldn't be there for the harvest.

Luiz is dead, mysteriously and fatally stabbed, and Margaret Binton, Luiz's second in command'and nobody's fool, begins to wonder why there's a bare patch next to the cucumbers. She starts digging and what she finds there sends her from an uptown pool hall to the garment district to the wilds of Brooklyn in pursuit of a desperate killer.

With the intrepid support of her Broadway cronies and her , long-suffering pals at the N.YPD., Lieutenant Morley and Sergeant Schaeffer, Margaret risks life and limb with her usual inspired abandon to get to the root of the matter....