He got the his sobriquet when as a child his aunts would visit from New York laden with rare delicacies such as bagels, lox, and pumpernickel which he stubbornly refused preferring grits, gravy and even pork. Now he lives in a house provided by the institution he works for sharing it with his teenage daughter and son and ex-mother-in-law who moved in as housekeeper when her own daughter divorced Gritz. At seventy-five she whips up a mean chopped liver, plays mah-jongg wearing tie-dyed T-shirts and protests the incursions of Wal-Mart into her town. Only occasionally does she try to fix Gritz up with a “nice Jewish girl.”

Gritz’s lunchtime routine is upset one day when he receives a call that a man is threatening to jump off the roof of a historic downtown hotel. That’s not the case he discovers. The man is T Royal a seventy something black man who used to take care of Gritz as a child so his parents could run their clothing store. T just wandered on the roof a bit disconcerted after confronting the ghost of a long dead friend, Mordecai Moore. Moore was accused of murdering a young white woman in that hotel sixty-five years earlier and executed for the crime. Now that T Royal has returned to Ashville to retire Mordecai is determined to have justice. Even then rumors abounded that important deals were made under the pretext of a poker game where Mordecai just happened to act as waiter.

Soon Gritz is drawn into a conspiracy of silence that has lasted all these years involving Willard Dudley Paully, a white supremacist who admired Hitler in the years just prior to the war. Someone else killed the girl and Moore became the scapegoat so that powerful moneymen could protect their identities and the purpose of their meeting so many years ago. In the pursuit of Truth and Justice Gritz and T meet an aged mute computer whiz who lives in a nursing home, a wacky massage therapist who reads auras and paints landscapes on her toenails, nearly resort to exhuming a grave and uncover far more secrets than they ever imagined. Local politics, the synagogue and even the presidency have a part in the conspiracy.

The characters are well drawn and believable even at their kookiest. Like his hero, David Schulman has a background in the clothing business. After running his own chain for 27 years he decided to fulfill his dream to become a writer. (He can still judge a 42 long at first glance.) There is much research behind his plot which makes the whimsicality of some characters even more delightful. I look forward to more in this series.

--Jane Davis