"Make room for a new hero in popular crime fiction," wrote Larry King in USA Today upon the publication of reporter Robert Rosenberg's first novel. "The hero is one Avram Cohen. The book is Crimes of the City. This is a thriller in the grand fashion. You will not put it down for an instant.".

Readers agreed. Now Avram Cohen returns in a suspenseful new yarn that takes Jerusalem's most legendary detective (legendary for his instincts, his chutzpah, his temper, and his taste for cognac) from his beat in the Holy City to that unholiest of cities, Hollywood, where complicated crimes are concealed by perfect scenery and stars and sharks whose business is illusion. No city of angels, L.A.

Or so Cohen discovers when a suicide he calls murder plunges him into the cold heart of Beverly Hills and the movie business. The victim? A director, a friend. A man Cohen had trusted since childhood when the two helped each other survive the nightmare of the Holocaust in a Nazi concentration camp. Suicide? Was he sick of the glitter? Or murder? What were Max Broder's secrets? The casting couch and the women he used? Cocaine?

Or the past - and the memories even Hollywood's most expensive comforts couldn't soften. The answers, Cohen discovers, lie in Broder's last film, an epic testament to their friendship in the camps. What made it too risky for the studio? And why did Broder turn to the kingpin of L.A.'s Jewish mafia for ammunition to feed his battle with the guys who controlled his movie's future?

Everyone, Cohen discovers, seems to know more than they're telling. But no one has the whole picture. Not Goldie Stein, Hollywood"s toughest tattletale ("She seemed to create scandals for her own pleasure..."), who tries to wrap him around her perfectly manicured fingers. Not Laszlo Katz, the billionaire magnate who turned Holocaust memories into "Shoah business." Not Sophie - haunted, untrusting, beautiful ("He stood at the center of the long pool, waiting for her to reach him.

As she approached, he realized she was naked. The water was so clear and her method so smoothly repetitive, he could see the muscles rippling on her back...") - or feisty Mike Madden, Beverly Hills cop. No one has even an inkling of what led Max Broder to the end of his rope.

1. In Avram Cohen - rumpled, lonely, growing older and shrewder - readers will discover one of the most appealing and interesting detective creations of recent years. In The Cutting Room, they will find a plot built of gripping scenes among the palms and pools. No one who loves the suspense and unforgettable characters of great detective fiction should miss Cohen or The Cutting Room.