CARNEY

To her usual mix of good guys vs. bad guys and cops vs. other cops, Carter adds a new conflict: Capt. Delia Mariola, chief of detectives for the struggling town of Baxter, vs. the title character.

Tom Carney starts out as the muscle for Benny Kaplan, a fence specializing in high-end cars. It’s in that capacity that he beats up burglar Harman Broad, who won’t accept Benny’s word that the six-carat diamond he stole is really a topaz, and goes to jail. But although the story flips back and forth between chapters headlining Carney and Mariola, they’re really on the same side: Carney’s a former Philadelphia cop whom Mariola’s recruited to go deep undercover. The real conflict between them lies in how they want to handle Baxter’s morass of corruption. Though she often skates on thin ice, Mariola wants to do things by the book; for Carney, it’s all personal, whether he’s working for—that is, investigating—Benny or middle manager George Pratt, or working with Zacariah McBride to convert the Spinning Wheel Saloon into the Blue Skies Tavern, or gathering evidence against some of Baxter’s finest at the request of other cops who are even finer. By the time the story emerges from its Boardwalk Empire episode and closes in on this year’s ringleaders, Mariola—who’s focused on doing what little she can to help her teenage son, Danny, attract the attention of baseball scouts—isn’t even sure she trusts Carney anymore. And in a world as torn by corruption as Baxter on its best day, you can see why not.

As usual, Carter’s tawdry landscape is equally pleasurable to enter and to leave.