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Dramatis personae: Ricky Torres, ex-cop and Iraqi veteran, cab driver, who, unfortunately, lasts only part of page 1; Raymond Donne, schoolteacher, ex-cop, and his Uncle Ray, chief of detectives, NYPD; Jack Knight, former cop turned private I; Edgar Martinez O'Brien, a computer geek with Asperger's syndrome; Charles Golden, a highly connected, very wealthy, sleazy politico; his rebellious teen daughter who is missing; barkeeps with hearts of gold, thugs, womenfolk who serve the coffee; burned-out vets and cops, etc., etc., inhabitants of the mean streets of New York City.
When Ricky Torres receives a fast bullet while seated next to his buddy from the NYPD, Raymond Donne, Ricky's death becomes personal, very personal. Donne, retired from the police, is pulling a stint as a public school teacher, and it's summer vacation. With his ex-partner Jack Knight, Raymond uses his police-force contacts to trace Ricky's last movements. What haunts him is the pretty woman's face on Ricky's cell phone, and his inquiry at a high-rise condominium that is considerably above Ricky's income level. Conversing with one of Ricky's pals from Iraq, Raymond learns that Ricky drove into a sniper's trap. When a sniper is given a plum job, Ray learns, an easy mark, it's called by a baseball term: dead red.
About the same time, Charles Golden's pretty daughter, perfectly groomed to be a rich man's possession, has gone missing. Golden hires Jack Knight and Raymond Donne to trace her whereabouts. She is somehow associated with the beautiful woman whose face appears on the cell telephone of Ricky, the dead veteran. The search for the missing Golden girl and Ricky's killer takes us to cocktail parties where we schmooze with New York's politically connected, a whorehouse guarded by a pit bull who attacks on command, the little restaurants and bars that dot every block of The City and are the locus of its public heartbeat. We keep circling back to the cab company for which Ricky was driving, to cabs tracked by GPS, a cab switched with another cabby the night Ricky was shot …
And, unfortunately, telling you more would give away the intricately plotted solution to the crimes under investigation.
My gender and age prejudice me against this novel: I crave female protagonists that do more than serve coffee and leave the building when told "scram." I also tire of the male stereotype of the crazed sniper returned from Iraq. However, I write from a small town, and even as I pen these words, people in cities are thinking of clever, too clever for our good, ways to disappear those who are inconvenient to them. And, even as I visit the grocery store or the mailbox, members of the human tribe twist the Second Amendment so that it carries the notions of a license to shoot other people, the notion of patriotism to mean death to the denizens of tribes unlike our own.
§ Cathy Downs is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, February 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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