JIM UGLY

For 12-year-old Jake Bannock, "Jim Ugly" seems like a good name for his buried father's wolflike dog, but that low opinion changes when Jake figures out that his father isn't dead after all and he and the dog set out on a hopeful search for him. Sam Bannock—who has stolen a fortune in diamonds from theater impresario C.W. Cornelius and his sinister confederate D. D. Skeats, and left beautiful actress Wilhelmina Marlybone-Jenkins waiting at the church—is also the object of other searches, all of which converge in San Francisco after the sorts of twists, turns, and chases you'd expect from the author of The Midnight Horse and The Whipping Boy. Flushed out at last, Sam explains that he hid the diamonds by feeding them to his niece's chickens; but when everyone arrives at the chicken farm, the birds are gone, scattered across the Nevada desert. Jake, at least, is happy in the end: he has his old father, a new mother, and a dog that now answers only to his call. Fine helter-skelter melodrama. (Fiction. 10-13)