Limited Partner — Mike Lupica

Sportswriter Lupica ( Dead Air ) again demonstrates his gifts for terse, hip dialogue and for name-dropping Manhattan's hot spots and trendy topics in Steve Finley's busy return. A journalist on cable TV, Finley is upset to hear that his fast-lane friend Bobby Wyman, one of several limited partners in a club called Tim Tiernan's, has died of a heroin overdose. Finley knows that Bobby had been seriously sober for some time, so he believes Bobby's girlfriend when she says the ostensible OD was a murder. But the ``coke whore'' is herself bumped off; the club's major partner, former Mets pitching ace Tom Tiernan, is too pathetically drunk to be useful; and interviews with other partners, their associates and other slimeballs turn up more smoke than heat. Eventually, a clever ruse to track down a current Mets ace in a rehab clinic pays off. Finley and his team of yuppie Jimmy Olsons are led to a secret and marvelously illegal after-hours joint, link the murder to the Mafia and, with the last-second help of a gift tip, the killer. Unfortunately, repeated musings about the Boston Red Sox, along with shallow characters, weaken the already minimal suspense. The Manhattan nightclub scene, moreover, is pared to a disappointing series of glib asides. (Oct.)