Books: Rewards & Punishments

PARRIS MITCHELL OF KINGS Row (333 pp.)—Henry and Katharine Bellamann—Simon & Schuster ($3).

Kings Row, a bestseller of eight years ago, was an oversized and overwritten but doggedly sympathetic effort to see through the front doors and store clothes of a whole Midwestern horse-&-buggy town. When Author Henry Bellamann died in 1945, he was working on the second book of what he had planned as a trilogy. Finished by his wife Katherine, Parris Mitchell of Kings Row (the Literary Guild selection for May) carries the story through World War I, continues with unimaginative tolerance a chronicle of everyday good & evil...