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Author Reggie Nadelson writes a long, slow-moving, emotionally wrenching detective series featuring Artie Cohen, a Russian Jew who emigrated to New York from Israel after he reached his teenaged years. That has a lot to do with his outlook, and with his natural ability with languages. Artie is trilingual. He speaks Russian, Hebrew, and English. This makes him ideal for assignment with a special New York Police squad which deals with missing, kidnapped and otherwise abused children. The head of his squad is a policeman who has an intense love-hate relationship with Artie, and the feelings are reciprocated. So, apart from the normal tensions of the job, often racing against time to try to find a child before he or she is destroyed, Artie and his boss often disagree. Hence there are several scenes in which the two scream at each other. Artie is called in when a runner at Coney Island discovers a pile of bloody clothing on the beach. It is winter and the city's residents are still recovering from the horror of 9-11. A sometimes frantic search for the owner of the clothing steers Artie through the snow-filled streets of a cold, unfriendly, unforgiving city. Along the way he encounters, numerous lies, bad cops, infidelity, theft, smuggling and a host of other crimes, large and small. He travels from the meanest streets to the highest and wealthiest brittle societies in the city. Artie has other problems. He's divorced and still in love with his wife. He's lonely, he is abusing his relationship with his current girlfriend. He believes the subject of his current case, a boy missing from a posh Brooklyn house -- it certainly isn't a home -- may be the son he never had and to whom he is or was very close. Ethically he should have revealed the relationship and stepped back from the case. Artie is angst-ridden, so much so, I was surprised he was able to function at all. There are a host of dysfunctional characters in this novel, and while the mystery that drives it is well-thought out, carefully plotted and well-written, DISTURBED EARTH, the fifth in the series, is difficult to read. It is dense, intense, dark and rich in its characterizations, and its evocation of parts of New York society, and its motivations. But for this reviewer, it was uncomfortable and exhausting to read.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, February 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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