Larry's Kidney. Daniel Asa Rose. Morrow. 320 pages. $25.99

Pretty soon we will see a new section in the bookstore: body-part travelogue. Whether they're driving around with Albert Einstein's brain or recounting the fate of Abraham Lincoln's body, some nonfiction writers seem fascinated with the strange and independent travels of certain body parts.

Daniel Asa Rose offers a new twist on the genre. Instead of following a body part around, he searches one out: a kidney for his cousin Larry, who hates dialysis and has just about no chance on the U.S. waiting list for a transplant. But in China, that waiting list can be a lot shorter, if you have money, connections and the willingness to negotiate the black market and risk arrest since China outlawed organ transplants to westerners.

Larry, a part-time professor from Pembroke Pines, has the money and the chutzpah. Dan, a writer and editor, has some (not entirely pleasant) experience in China (25 years ago). Naturally, the trip's a go.

Like traveling for weeks on end with another person, this sort of book could grow tiresome quickly in the wrong hands, but Rose is a gifted writer and good company. He's horrified and fascinated by China, which at the time of his visit is in full-on Olympics-preparation mode and full-on denial about the Tiananmen Square massacre. His simple description of driving from the Beijing airport to his hotel ''through the sweltering smogshine that feels like a moist anvil on my head'' gives you an idea: That's really interesting, and I'm sure glad it involves him and not me.

The relationship between the cousins is at the heart of the book. Larry is intelligent and enterprising, an Elmore Leonard character come to life, but he has always felt like an outsider in his well-to-do, achieving family because his mother married an illiterate mechanic. Rose calls Larry ''an inventor of get-poor-quick schemes'' and describes him as looking like Al Goldstein of Screw magazine fame. ``Kind of the friendly family pornographer type, but you know he could deck you with a sucker punch if he wanted to.''

But he also sees Larry's vulnerability. In addition to wanting a kidney, Larry is also seeking a wife in China and has made contact with a candidate through a mail-order bride website. Naturally, this candidate does not turn out to be exactly as advertised.

Rose must make the connections to find a transplant, negotiate their accommodations and travel, decide whether they'd be better off trying their luck in the Philippines -- and evaluate whether Larry's potential bride is a complete fraud.

Readers will come to share Rose's exasperated fondness for Larry and for China, the country and the people, even the all-pervasive industrial pollution that miraculously clears for a few days but is almost comforting when it returns. ''That luscious ivory gray smoke, with its tinge of fish stink, it's become part of me, and me of it,'' Rose writes. ''We've been respiring together, China and me.'' The adventure is entertaining, all right. At least to read about.

Nancy Klingener is a writer in Key West.

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