A Minyan for the Dead — Richard Fliegel

Ten men were a minyan, and a minyan is what the aging congregants of the synagogue needed for a service. Max Pfeiffer, new business partner to ex cop Shelly Lowenkopf, had persuaded Shelly to accompany him to the Bronx sanctuary. But Shelly's presence among the faithful wasn't enough. Not only was the rabbi late, he never appeared: upstairs in his cluttered study, the rabbi was arrested for murder. Shelly's ex cohorts on the police force have ballistics, prints, even motive in the murder of one Lillian Levinski. But now that Shelly has gone private, and is earning lavish commissions for selling furniture while catching furniture thieves, the old Allerton Avenue cop has a new found confidence. And if he can free his old partner Homer Greeley from a quagmire of bloody gang killings, the two might just do something for which God himself will love them: prove why the rabbi did not kill Lilly Levinski, and who really did.