ROTTEN APPLES: True Stories of New York...

ROTTEN APPLES: True Stories of New York Crime and Mystery, 1689 to the Present by Marvin Wolf and Katherine Mader (Ballantine: $10, illustrated). These accounts of big-city crimes have the agreeably salacious tone of a sleazy best seller. Some of the scandals that Wolf and Mader describe have been reported many times: The murder of architect Sanford White by Harry Thaw over Evelyn Nesbitt, the original girl on the red velvet swing, or the shooting of robber baron “Jubilee” Jim Fiske in the Broadway Central Hotel. But the authors must have combed the tabloids to dig up such obscure cases as the trial of Albert Fish, “The Manhattan Cannibal,” or the unsolved murder of Isadore Fink, who was shot in a locked room in Harlem. The locations of the various crimes are keyed to “Hagstrom’s Atlas,” in case the reader cares to take a walking tour of New York’s more dubious sights. This lightweight history is hardly the place to learn about the recalcitrant Captain Jacob Leisler or the corrupt empire of William Marcy (Boss) Tweed, but it could provide engaging if outre reading on a flight to the Big Apple.