Hugh HoltonKirja-arvosteluja

A very twisty story about a police detective who is injured during a routine drug bust at the National Science and Space Museum. While he's resting he discovers that over the years people have gone missing there and none of them have been found, his curiousity piqued he finds himself caught up in a twisty story and also starts to find a relationship with a co-worker.
It's an interesting story with well-drawn characters even if they seem to be somewhat over the top. It flowed well and kept me reading.½

We have a German "fixer" who is hired by Tony "The Tuxedo" to kill a senator who will expose the crime lord's dealings.
We have a lady cop who is very good at disguises and gets herself into hot water.
We have a senator who is poisoned by the German's son
We have an FBI that has a secret group of agents.
We have a whole group of FBI agents following Tony the Tux, to no avail
The FBI man who does the killing is related to the German but doesn't know it.

It's rare that I abandon a book. I got about 100 pages in and realized I just didn't care. Something struck me as very artificial about the characters, almost cartoonish. Sorry. I'll try one of other books as he comes highly recommended.

This book had a few twists but most were fairly obvious. Unfortunately, the author turned what could have been a really good storyline into a fairly boring book. I had to struggle to get through it and I've already forgotten most of the salient points. Not worth my time.

This book, a Detective Larry Cole mystery, is a posthumous publication, Holton having died in 2001. There is no indication that anyone has added to it, so I can only presume that Holton had completed it, or appeared to have completed it, before he died. I say "appeared to have completed it" because it reads like an early draft that needs work, a lot of work.

The plot revolves around a young woman, Morgana Devoe, whose guardian was murdered when she was thirteen, and who is intent on revenge. She arrives in Chicago intending to kill the murderer, and becomes involved with Cole's son, Larry, Jr. (known as Butch), who is a police cadet. It turns out that she is actually the daughter of Margo and Neil DeWitt, married serial killers who were Cole's nemeses, but who are now dead. Their multi-billion dollar holdings are now being administered by a very nasty piece of work, lawyer Franklin Butler, and his assistant, Susanne York, who is also out for revenge on a variety of people.

Revenge fails on many levels. While Holton's writing was never the best, his mysteries could generally succeed in the plotting. But the prose in this book is so stilted and repetitious that the best of plots could not survive it, and this is not the best of plots. It's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and he leaves a lot of loose ends. The ending is over the top, even for Holton, and includes a bit of graphic sex, something that I do not recall from his other books (though, admittedly, it's been quite a while since I read one) and so was a bit jarring.

The absence of editing is evident, not only in typos, but in such things as the misuse of words ("implicated", where "implied" is clearly what was meant), wrong names being used, and what the film world calls "continuity". Morgana lives in what is described in the space of less than two pages as a "town house", then a "penthouse", then a "townhouse" again. In one place, her home is on North Sheridan Road, then on Lake Shore Drive. (The book is set in Chicago, and these are real streets that do not intersect.)

Because the book is set is a specific, real, location, at a specific time, details can and should be verified. As a lawyer, I'm particularly annoyed at the many errors in law and legal procedure, with which, as a long-time Chicago police officer, Holton should have been conversant. He should have known that no trial court judge could allow cameras in a courtroom, as that's a violation of Illinois Supreme Court Rules.* He should have known that motions to suppress statements are heard pre-trial by a judge, not as part of a jury trial. While occasionally one must allow an author literary license so that he can improve the story or move it along, the errors in this book do neither.

The book is copyrighted by Holton's daughter, and I appreciate that she probably wanted her father's last work published, but it needed considerable editing and revision before being in publishable form.

*This was true at the time I wrote this review (and when Holton wrote the book). The rules have now changed, and under some circumstances cameras are now permitted in Illinois courts.

Hugh Holton, a thirty-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, wrote several successful novels before he died in 2001 but one project was still unfinished at the time of his death. Now more than seven years later, that project has been published as "The Thin Black Line." The book’s subtitle, "True Stories by Black Law Enforcement Officers Policing America’s Meanest Streets," tells Holton’s readers what to expect.

Holton’s editor, Robert Gleason, allows twenty-eight police officers, twenty men and eight women, to tell their individual stories in conversational first person narratives. The twenty-eight interviews include those of three Chicago police officers named Holton: the author, his father, and an officer by the name of Aaron Holton who may or may not be a member of the author’s family. Of the officers interviewed, almost half of them are from Chicago and most of the rest are from large cities such as Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York and Philadelphia. To his credit, Holton included probation and correctional officers in his survey, a decision that adds a much-needed spark to the book.

Given that each person’s account is limited to six-to-eight pages, few of the narrators develop a personality or context of their own and their stories, no matter how dangerous the experiences they describe, tend to blend into a surprising blur of sameness. The most intriguing stories are told by those who decide to focus on one or two experiences rather than a listing of all of their most exciting and dangerous moments.

Because so many of those interviewed became police officers just when police departments around the country were beginning to recruit blacks for the first time, it is surprising that the issue of race is so seldom mentioned in the book. After all, as Holton states in his prologue, it was only after the assassination of Martin Luther King that most big city police departments came to understand there was a certain advantage to having black officers police black neighborhoods. Black policeman were recruited even in the deep South, although Sergeant Melvin Stokes of the Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, Sheriff’s Department recalls that “Black officers also couldn’t arrest white people” but, if it somehow happened that they did, they had “to call a white officer to transport them, ‘cause we didn’t want anybody to claim we did something bad to them before we got them into the jail.”

Philadelphia police officer Roger Tucker is another who mentions race during his career recap, however counterproductive and disappointing his statement turns out to be. According to Tucker, “I still believe that police officers are basically hired mercenaries…What you are doing is enforcing the majority laws on a minority community. Also what you are doing is trying to keep a large number of minorities from getting in the same position that you’ve been ‘privileged’ to get.” One wonders how this “mercenary” sleeps at night if he truly believes what he says about his life’s work.

With few exceptions, the twenty-eight people interviewed for "The Thin Black Line" never seem real. Because very little individual personality is on display, their war stories blend to the point that any potential impact on the reader is severely limited. There is no way to know if this is the book Hugh Holton would have written had he lived long enough to complete the task, but reproducing edited transcripts of the original interviews does not quite do the job, so perhaps Holton had more in mind for "The Thin Black Line" than this. Unfortunately, we will never know.

Rated at: 3.0