A young probation officer finds his shining ideals tarnished by a psychotic felon—in an unwieldy but joltingly urban- authentic crime thriller awash in liberal sentiment. Blauner is a contributing editor for New York magazine covering crime and politics, and that experience surfaces brightly in his pages' trim prose and street savvy, as does the half year he reportedly spent at the New York Dept. of Probation researching this first novel. His hero is probation officer Steven Baum, closing in on 30 but, unlike his colleagues, not yet burned out by the pathetic cast of malefactors tramping into his office each day. In the first person, Baum tells of his staggering caseload, his daily routine, his dumpy apartment, his Sixties-ish ideals, his appointment to a field position that means carrying a gun, his strained relationship with his racist and bitter Holocaust-survivor dad, his checkered love life, etc.: it's another moderately interesting tale of modern city woe, rather slow and self-indulgent. More gripping are the intercut third-person chapters: the pleasingly ironic, though nearly plot- extraneous, attempt by a corrupt municipal powerbroker to get back in the game after serving time; and, central to the plot, the scary antics—mayhem, robbery, murder—of Baum's new charge, young crack-addict/dealer Darryl King. It's King who smashes Baum's ideals as the sociopath not only mocks Baum's heartfelt help, but answers it with escalating violence that explodes in a shootout that leaves several cops dead. In a theatrical, extended conclusion, King, who's become an outlaw hero to the city's blacks, takes Baum hostage; the probation officer finds himself returning King's hate with hate—he's become his father at last. Richly observed characters and the seething lifeblood of the city glisten through the story's heavy moral glaze. A flawed but powerful debut, then, from a writer to watch.
Pub Date: June 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-10068-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.
Crime-fighting Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett outdoes himself during a temporary transfer from sleepy Saddlestring to fashionable Jackson Hole.
Will Jensen, the Jackson game warden, was a great guy and a model warden, but once his wife left him six months ago, he spiraled into madness and suicide, and now Joe’s been called to replace him. The transition is anything but smooth. There’s no question of Joe’s family coming with him, so he’s reduced to hoping he can get a signal for the cell-phone calls he squeezes into his busy schedule. En route to his new posting, Joe has to pursue a marauding grizzly. He arrives to meet a formidable series of challenges. Cantankerous outfitter Smoke Van Horn wants to go on attracting elk with illegal salt licks without the new warden’s interference. Animal Liberation Network activist Pi Stevenson wants him to publicize her cause and adopt a vegan diet. Developer Don Ennis wants to open a housing development for millionaires who like their meat free of additives. Ennis’s trophy wife Stella simply wants Joe—and he wants her back. As he wrestles with these demands, and with a supervisor riled over Joe’s track record of destroying government property in pursuit of bad guys (Trophy Hunt, 2004, etc.), Joe slowly becomes convinced that Will did not kill himself.
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15291-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.
In Hoag’s (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska.
Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department’s new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam’s first case without Nikki is the double murder—"raw animal violence"—of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor’s own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father’s unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam’s cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy’s widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy’s long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana’s lover and Lucien’s rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father’s murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor—Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"—Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai.
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95455-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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