FICTION

WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE by Fredrick Barton (Villard: $20; 384 pp.) Rare is the mystery novel whose ending genuinely surprises. This one surprises. Even shocks. If you stick it out to the end, you’re in for a treat. Big if . For “With Extreme Prejudice” can’t make up its mind what it is. Sometimes it’s a treatise--albeit an enlightened one--on racism. Sometimes it’s a movie review. Sometimes it’s a letter to the Penthouse Forum. When it gets down to business, though, Fredrick Barton’s book is a superior, savvy tangle of greed, graft and sudden violence, with a pervasive subtext of the struggle between unconscious bias and better instincts. Barton’s stage is New Orleans--the Big Easy, a city drifting into dysfunction stemming from white flight and black power. His plot--needlessly complicated--revolves around a three-faced white wheeler-dealer cheating a black builder out of a contract to erect a school. The builder sues, represented by the lawyer wife of protagonist Mike Barnett. A hitherto upright, even heroic liberal judge rules against the builder. The fix is in, but whose, and why? The builder dies; the lawyer dies. Widower Barnett pursues the case, and winds up the suspect in three murders. While not sleuthing, drinking or graphically recalling sex with his wife, Barnett writes movie reviews for the local paper. How do we know? Because six of them are printed here. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it’s because author Barton is also a film critic. And a pretty fair novelist.