It’s here! SHAFT AMONG THE JEWS! I got a hardcover and that has a plain black cover with white text. No big ol’ Shaft head and some women. But that’s ok. This one has book flaps. And the book flaps tell us about … the book!

John Shaft is back. Smooth, black, and deadly, the private eye whose initial recorded exploits established him as out first genuine superhero since James Bond, is on the prowl again, this time as the best-paid shvartze ever to set foot into the inner sanctums of New York’s famed diamond district.

His clients for this exotic adventure are a committee of Hassidim, orthodox Jews whom Shaft at first mistakes for a posse of cowboys. Diamond merchants all, they are concerned over certain inexplicable events–a few murders, some disappearances of sizable gem collections–in what is usually a tightly self-controlled and most explicable business.

Impelled by dyspepsia for his newly decorated office and a promised fee beyond any he has ever imagined receiving, Shaft steps out intrepidly into a strange world–a world of large icy stones, of hushed, veloured showrooms, of rabbinically cast karate experts–dogged by his exasperated friend from the precinct, Lt. John Anderozzi, and paralleled by a task force of Israeli secret agents.

The action is swift and unpredictable, by turns violent and comic, and while Shaft comes out on top, one cannot say he is never at a loss in Ernest Tidyman’s pell-mell, sophisticated, and inventive caper

Jesus fuck, this might be the best book ever written. EVER! WRITTEN! I can’t wait.