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Review by Nan Goldberg
The Karps -- Butch and Marlene, nine-year-old Lucy and the twins -- are like a lot of urban professional families. Despite the dangers and inconveniences of Manhattan life, they hang on somehow, continually subdividing their converted loft space in SoHo, sharing dog walkings and baby feedings. Butch works for the city, Marlene owns her own business. He's a non-religious Jew, she's a practicing Catholic. They try to divide their attentions equally among their children, and hardly ever, anymore, find the energy or privacy for romance. Pretty typical.
Except for some significant differences.
The dog, Sweetie, is a killer, and so is Marlene, whose detective agency specializes in protecting women who are being stalked. Lucy's favorite after-school activity isn't ballet or soccer, it's target practice with mom at the shooting range.
Butch is chief of the Manhattan Homicide Bureau, and thus has both professional and personal reasons to oppose Marlene's career choice and crime-fighting techniques. Because stalkers are motivated by obsession, and because protection orders against them are usually ineffective, it sometimes happens that protecting the victim means killing her tormentor. It's a form of vigilante justice, and Butch just doesn't like it. Nor does his boss, the Manhattan D.A., who is only partly joking when he suggests that Butch convince his wife to please obliterate her bad guys outside the borough of Manhattan.
Whether the end justifies the means is the question that drives this combination courtroom thriller/suspense novel, as each character confronts moral dilemmas, marital tension, danger and the risk of failure while fighting evil in his or her own way.
A former assistant D.A. for the Manhattan Homicide Bureau, Tanenbaum knows his stuff and tells it splendidly, mixing irony and action in just the right amounts. This is his ninth thriller featuring this couple of married crime-fighters, and he shows no sign of running out of narrative steam. It's especially nice, these days, when you can simultaneously root for the good guys to win and the marriage to survive.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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