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PRIVATE JUSTICE
by Richard Sand
Durban House, November 2001
240 pages
$15.95
ISBN: 1930754175


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

At one time, Lucas Rook was a detective with the NYPD, as was his twin brother, Kirk. When Kirk is killed on the job, Lucas brutally avenges his death and leaves the force. It's been almost 10 years since that happened. Rook is now settled in as a PI who goes beyond finding the solution to a crime; he avenges it as well.

His current case is to find the killer of the young daughter of Harry Raimondo. As it turns out, there are other young girls who have died whose cases have similar characteristics to the Raimondo girl. The police have been unable to find any evidence whatsoever, though not for lack of trying. The lead detective, Jimmy Salerno, still reads the homicide book and hopes to uncover the killer some day. Lucas offers his assistance to Salerno's boss, Inspector Joe Zinn. He's pretty much viewed as persona non grata by the department. They don't want anything to do with him and prefer to handle the investigation on their own.

The book is fairly straightforward. Surprisingly, the majority of the narrative follows Salerno and his partner rather than the lead character, Lucas Rook. It felt as though Sand couldn't decide what he wanted the book to be, a police procedural following detectives on the case or the tale of the rogue PI who went outside the boundaries to exact justice.

The book was reasonably well written. My main problem with it was the fact that there were no noble characters. At first, it seemed that Salerno might fill that role, as he had doggedly kept the investigation alive over a period of time. But as it turned out, he and his partner were quite unethical in their actions. Among the transgressions were the fact that he collected evidence from a child's dead body while the medical examiner was eating, leaving the full team without the evidence that they needed. In another instance, he and his partner set up a phony interview complete with a fake lie detector. It was hard to admire characters who played so far outside the rules. I also had a problem with some of the gratuitous violence in the book. It seemed that the cops and Rook were all of the school that felt it was perfectly appropriate to brutalize someone they suspected of abusing children, even if they had no proof that they were correct.

I rather expected that Rook would find the key to the killer and unveil the results to the investigating team, but that was not what happened. The entire ending of the book was a disappointment, both in the revelation of the killer and their motivations. I felt that Sand was trying to go for the "big surprise" ending, but he hadn't developed the scenario enough to make it feel plausible.

The book is well paced and the narrative flows well. Technically, the writing is good. Unfortunately, it was not a book that I enjoyed greatly due to the ending and the ethics practiced by the characters. I thought that the character of Lucas showed great promise in terms of being a unique protagonist, but that promise was not realized in Private Justice.

Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, April 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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