BONEYARDS

Downbeat, pungent slice of crooked-cop life, circa 1977 Chicago—and a rare nonseries outing for Campbell (the Jimmy Flannery novels: In a Pig's Eye, etc.; the Whistler novels: Sweet La-La Land, etc.). Sergeant Ray Sharkey is an archetypally bent cop—16 years on the force, ``his innocence...lost and gone forever,'' a savvy Irish loner protecting his many crooked deals by knowing how to show local pols a good time: ``the City Hall Pimp,'' he's called behind his back. But time's running out on Ray. A mayoral election is approaching, and the likely winner, known here only as ``the Candidate,'' thinks Ray will make the perfect target for an anticorruption campaign. And Ray's personal life is headed for the rocks, too—his cancer-stricken wife, whose medical bills drove him on the pad years ago, is near death; his redheaded beauty of a sister, Wilda, whose body he secretly craves, is breaking all the rules by hanging out with black musicians; and he himself, a racist born and bred, has tumbled into a nightmare of lust by falling for Roma Chounard, a black whore loaned him by top pimp Jasper Tourette. Still, as always, Ray needs money and can't resist a $5,000 payoff to get his brother, a judge, to throw a case—even though Ray knows that the deal's a sting orchestrated by the Candidate. And then there's the corpse found beaten to death in a fleabag hotel, with clues pointing toward Tourette and maybe even the Candidate himself. Using all his street smarts, Ray finesses the payoff and solves the murder, but he can't beat his own forbidden yearnings for Roma and his sister, which push him into an acts of cruelty and vengeance that finally bring the law crashing down on him. Tough-minded and authentic, but lacking the charm and mordancy of Campbell's series work; anyway, Joseph Wambaugh and Stephen Solomita, among others, have tracked this kind of dinosaur cop before.