LONG TIME GONE

Inept, ultraviolent thriller about an ex-hippie’s search for—what else?—his lost sense of peace, brother.

On a fateful night back in fateful 1969, 17-year-old Danny Cassidy, well and truly stoned on a variety of mind-altering substances, is dragged from his Brooklyn pad by one cop in order to stare down at another. The first is very angry, the second very dead, young Danny very much in the running as the causative factor, according to the best available evidence. Not that the evidence (low-grade circumstantial) is really persuasive, but how is Danny to contravene it? He was tripping when Detective Vito Malone took six bullets from a .45. Maybe he’d landed exactly where Detective Tufano said he did, in Prospect Park, blasting away at the defunct detective who just happened to be the entirely ill-disposed father of Erika, Danny’s sweetheart. Drug-addled, his brain a sieve, Danny is hard put to convince even himself he was incapable of murder. Flash forward 32 years. No case ever having been made against him, Danny has managed to cobble together a reasonable sort of life. At 49, he’s a newspaper reporter employed by a Los Angeles daily when he gets the phone call informing him of his father’s death. He returns to Brooklyn to bury his dad and to mount the obligatory voyage of self-discovery. In the process, he finds (1) that a small army of others had reason to despise vicious Vito, and (2) that gorgeous Erika, now nearing 50, has maintained her “wasp-thin waist,” “bubble” backside, and can, in the interest of sexual gratification, fit effortlessly into her “BVM Catholic school uniform,” and (3) that Detective Tufano, rooted in the Inspector Javert tradition, continues to like him for the unsolved cop-killing.

Another in columnist-cum-novelist Hamil’s skein of mindless, tasteless, overheated potboilers (Fork in the Road, 2000, etc.).