APPARITION ALLEY

by Katherine V. Forrest ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1997

Watch your back when you're arresting a drug suspect for the LAPD. If you don't, the resulting gunplay could leave the suspect dead and you wounded by friendly fire--and after you're released from the hospital, as Det. Kate Delafield learns, your problems really begin: answering endless questions for a review board, wondering which of your colleagues shot you, sitting through hours of psychotherapy sessions, and finally getting picked by Officer Luke Taggart as the representative for the hearing convened to determine why he shot a drug dealer of his own in a late-night hostage-taking. Taggart tells Kate he chose her only because she's a good investigator whose recent experience with the system will make her sympathetic to him. But he doesn't act as if he wants sympathy, even though his colleagues in the Hollywood Division, outraged that he informed on one partner who ate his gun, froze him out even before he lost the second, Tony Ferrera, in a liquor-store holdup. Instead, Taggart, who insists against all the evidence that he never fired his gun in Apparition Alley, alternately acts secretive and suspicious, and goes into paranoid attack mode by insisting Ferrera was killed by cops because of some story he was about to tell that would blow the lid off a conspiracy of silence at the troubled LAPD. Forrest (Liberty Square, 1996, etc.) gives full weight to her lesbian heroine's anguish at coming to terms with her personal demons without ever swamping a police-corruption plot that could have been plucked from today's headlines.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997

Categories: FICTION