DATE: Wednesday, September 24, 1997         TAG: 9709230045

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E7   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY GEORGE HOLBERT TUCKER 

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

MYSTERY WRITER FRIEDMAN DOESN'T DISAPPOINT

I AM FINDING it increasingly difficult to review Kinky Friedman's offbeat and marvelously entertaining mystery novels. Even so, the fault is not in any way a falling off on the part of the Kinkster, who shamelessly portrays himself as the main character in all of his fictitious escapades. My problem is that, having already given all of his earlier novels four-star ratings, I have run out of superlatives to describe the great pleasure they have given me and his other ardent fans.

With this apologetic curtain raiser, I'll make an effort to evaluate Kinky's latest caper.

As Kinky fans already know, you have to put your sense of probability on hold when you mentally invade his literary milieu. Once that is accomplished, however, it is a guarantee you'll be rewarded with a great yarn even if all of your cherished ideas of political correctness are done in before the last page.

And if some of his pertinent observations on life make you wince temporarily, you'll finally realize, if you are honest with yourself, that they are sad but true comments on the realities of life rather than the sugar-coated shibboleths that many would like to sweep under the rug.

This time around, Kinky, who lives with his cat in a New York East Village loft beneath a lesbian dance studio, wakes up one afternoon with a terrible hangover. When he attempts to wash his face, he looks up and sees a vision in his bathroom mirror. Needless to say, the vision is not Kinky's phiz but that of a carefree and philosophic gypsy (one of Kinky's alter egos) who informs him that he had better begin making plans to alter his self-centered, Irish whiskey-drenched life and get out and mingle with others before he winds up in the loony bin.

Fortunately, at that point, his old and greatly admired friend, folk singer Willie Nelson, telephones from Texas and invites him to join him on a concert tour. Once the Kinkster boards the Honeysuckle Rose, Nelson's tour bus, however, he realizes that something is rotten in the Lone Star State. After interrogating Nelson's intimate companions, Kinky learns that the driver of the bus has totaled a drunken Indian medicine man a few months earlier. Also, that Nelson had subsequently been handed a mysterious ``medicine bundle'' (a supposed curse) by an anonymous Indian shortly afterward. This has put a damper on Nelson's usual philosophical outlook on life, for being part Native American himself, he believes that the dead man's followers are out to get him.

That this turns out not to be the case is a cause for rejoicing later on. Meanwhile, Kinky returns to Manhattan to call on Rambam, his shady private investigator friend, to help lift the curse off his friend Willie. What happens next is too good and entertaining to reveal, but I'll let you in on one clue.

Once Kinky realizes it is not a Native American out to get Willie but a fiendishly clever paranoid state trooper who has it in for Willie for other reasons, the narrative races to a thrilling and unexpected finale - in the men's room of Madison Square Garden during a Willie Nelson concert.

Well, that's about all you're going to get from me now, but, without any further fanfare, I strongly urge you to relax and enjoy Kinky's latest excursion into the stratosphere of impossible, but enjoyable sleuthing. What's more, I hope I'll still be around to review his next mystery. Until then I'll have nothing but superlatives to characterize the 10 novels he has already written. MEMO: George Holbert Tucker is a columnist for The Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Kinky Friedman's latest mystery novel is ``Road Kill.''

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BOOK REVIEW

``Road Kill''

Author: Kinky Friedman

Publisher: Simon & Schuster. 232 pp.

Price: $23

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