Conveys the emotional toll exacted by years of cleaning up after human misdeeds, but lacks the crisp narrative and grit of...
Twenty-five-year veteran Sutton proves that there’s little glamour in police work.
He patrols low-income neighborhoods a few miles from the glitter of the Las Vegas strip, usually on the overnight graveyard shift. The 19 vignettes here reveal a world of domestic abuse, drug use, petty theft and random violence. An honor student hangs himself after receiving a less-than-perfect report card. A daughter beats her dying mother to death in a hospice bed. Gang members slay a grandmother in front of her grandchildren for complaining about the noise the gang members were making outside her tenement window. Victims are often the most innocent and defenseless: young children run down by cars, infants shot in drive-by shootings, the mentally unbalanced vagrants who have slipped through the social services net. When not on the job, Sutton (True Blue, 2004) spends his evenings alone, trying to drink away the grime from his last shift. It’s a grim portrait, relieved only by the rare uplifting encounter. In the last and longest vignette, a fellow police officer is lifted from a suicidal depression by a sick puppy he finds in a Dumpster. In an earlier tale, Sutton’s heart leaps when a young black girl hugs him after he helps her across a busy intersection. The author clearly knows these mean streets. Unfortunately, his narrative suffers from clumsy, overreaching prose and a maddening lack of crucial detail. Too often, he leaves us stranded at crime scenes without telling us whether victims lived or died, or if arrests were made. A rookie cop, in tears, phones Sutton after his partner commits suicide. A few days later, the rookie sends Sutton the same cryptic message that he’d retrieved from his dead partner’s car. Did the rookie also commit suicide? We never know.
Conveys the emotional toll exacted by years of cleaning up after human misdeeds, but lacks the crisp narrative and grit of the truly satisfying police story.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33896-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
A bizarre first-person account of a young man’s nearly disastrous obsession with serial killers. As a freshman at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, Moss, who dreamed of a career in law enforcement, conceived the idea of writing to serial killers on death row, hoping to gain their trust and discover what made them tick. His most extensive contact was with John Wayne Gacy, who had raped and murdered 33 teenage boys. He also corresponded with Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez (a.k.a. the Night Stalker), and other killers whom he admired for their nerve. To gain Gacy’s attention—death-row inmates of Gacy’s notoriety are besieged by would-be correspondents—Moss posed as a sexually confused and highly impressionable boy, matching himself to the profile of Gacy’s victims. When this ploy worked, Moss felt that he had psyched out the killer and assumed that he would be able to manipulate and control him. Soon, however, Moss found himself identifying with, even sympathizing with Gacy, who began telephoning him regularly. When Gacy invited him for an expense-paid visit, Moss discovered that the guards behaved more like servants and left him alone and unobserved in the same room with the convicted murderer. Though aging and handcuffed, Gacy was able to break Moss down and turn him into the confused and compliant young man he had been pretending to be, demonstrating for him not only how a predator operates but how a potential victim feels. Fortunately, Moss, who could easily have become Gacy’s last victim, escaped with only his ego bruised. A prologue and afterword by psychologist Kottler comment on both Moss’s behavior and society’s propensity for glorifying violence and turning serial killers into celebrities. An engrossing and gut-wrenching read. (20 b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52340-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Yale computer scientist Gelernter (1939: The Lost World of the Fair, 1995, etc.) offers a peculiar rant only tangentially about his ordeal as a Unabomber target and the resulting irreparable damage to his right hand and eye. Despite his claim that the bomb that almost killed him, and its aftermath, ``forced me to rething everything I knew about American society,'' it would be difficult to identify an opinion in the book that Gelernter doesn't appear to have held undisturbed for decades, except for his discovery that most reporters are amoral swine. The account of his recovery and newfound celebrity status fills out a thin and entirely unoriginal tract on the ``takeover'' of the American ``elite'' by ``intellectuals'' in the 1960s and the consequent moral degradation of American society that he sees, or reads about, all around him. He doesn't bother to explain who these intellectual masterminds really are (aside from Norman Mailer and Betty Friedan) or what the perverse theories are by which they rule, except for an excessive reverence for ``tolerance.'' Gelernter skips to his main complaint: The ``most disastrous consequence'' of this ``Civil Rights Religion'' is feminism. Tossing off generalizations that disintegrate upon examination (``A lesbian activist gets more respect nowadays than a homemaker''), Gelernter argues that many more women now work because female intellectuals are antagonistic to childrearing and have created a climate in which women are ideologically impelled to get out of the home. This screed is padded with a messy assembly of self-satisfied musings on Gelernter's own artistic sensitivity as poet, painter, and lover of music (punctuated by goofy self-deprecatring asides that define his particular style of false modesty) and, unsurprisingly, on a yearning for a relentlessly idealized 1930s America. Full of solipsism, smugness, and petty arrogance—an exercise in self-regard. (First serial to Time)
Pub Date: Sept. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83912-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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