"Legs" translated the career of a gangster into a shimmering, witty story that combined fact and myth to prod at our national ambivalence toward celebrity criminals. The disappointment of ["Billy Phelan's Greatest Game"] is not that it lacks its predecessor's magnetic core, but that its core is so weak that its author seems to disdain it: the story's depth, as someone once said, is entirely on the surface….

But it is a surface polished to a high gloss…. Kennedy's story, such as it is, concerns Albany's night people, who live on the edge of the underworld. Chief among these are Billy Phelan, a part-time bookie and gambler who is good enough at cards, pool and bowling to win more often than not, and Martin Daugherty, a failed novelist and columnist for the Albany paper, who writes admiringly of Billy's style. When a nephew of the city's political boss...