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SECOND WATCH
by Lowen Clausen
Signet, March 2003
377 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0451208196


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

When I moved to Boston in 1985, I brought a handful of books with me, including a Robert B. Parker. Imagine my surprise when a small business Spenser went to was a block and a half up the street from my first apartment. If I like where I'm living, I like books that really know the city - someone who gets it. Lowen Clausen was a Seattle police officer for 13 years, and he knows Seattle. I've been here just about that amount of time and am grateful to this writer for not writing tourist Seattle, or even the dark underbelly of gritty Seattle (we sweep here, honest) but of an area and a neighborhood as it exists.

SECOND WATCH is an elegantly written book about an ugly subject. The pleasure here is hardly that Clausen can write (his FIRST AVENUE was very good) but the undertones, the warmth, the kindness with which characters, especially secondary characters, are drawn.

In this police story, set in Ballard, a major Scandinavian neighborhood, not far from where l live, two police officers, beat patrol cops, find the bodies of two young people. It's murder, the two are clearly connected and when the two cops link up with another officer from the sex crimes unit, you have what may be one of the strongest showings of female police in the city. Katherine is brand new to her Ballard beat; Grace grew up here, but you might do a double-take on learning that, as Grace is the daughter of an African-American man and a Norwegian woman. Grace speaks the language, eats the food, and when the king of Norway visited Seattle's Ballard neighborhood some years ago, they spoke together as the kind walked down the street.

SECOND WATCH isn't perfect; there are eye-glazingly long and pretty unnecessary passages about relativity and even longer descriptions of a garbage crusher; granted this latter is necessary to the plot, but the endless paragraphs were boring and unclear. 

Still, this book reminds of Julie Smith's NEW ORLEANS MOURNING in its ability to capture at least one aspect of an interesting city. No attempt is made to say "this is Seattle" (any more than Smith pretended that all New Orleans was shown in that book) but it feels real and to this reader as if the authors (in both cases) knew their stuff and wanted to show you what it was like to be there in that specific city.

I'd like to have read the reports Clausen wrote when he was a cop. Sure, he also studied literature and writing during his years on the force, but that's no guarantee of style or quality. The subtleties of personalities, from Dale, who lives in the small apartment building that Katherine shares, near Broadway, to Daniel, the very shy boy who wanders Ballard with his little sister Mary, to Thomas, the street person who can explain Einstein to you, make this book more than just a good read. There are dimensions and nuances that make them whole. And Clausen manages something else successfully - while the crime is resolved, and Mary and Daniel are out of immediate danger, there are some loose ends. Not everything in SECOND WATCH results in tidy conclusions, not everyone lives happily every after, darn it. And while that's what I wanted, the author was right, because that's how real life works.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, February 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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