Fugitive City

This police procedural opens on a characteristically unlikely (and underdeveloped) scenario: two-bit lawyer Carol Beaufort settles her ravaged nerves with booze and pills; it's five a.m., and she has just received an anonymous phone call. Could it have come from a pickup? she wonders. But her caller is Kenny Trask, a client of hers, a criminal who has just escaped from the jail where she has been sending him steamy letters. Simpleton Trask and his sociopath ex-cell mate force her to join them in a spree of bank robberies that threaten to hamstring the local small but valiant police force, particularly the robbery division led by maverick cop Rob Medavoy. In a plot glued together by improbable coincidences, hero Medavoy has just busted Beaufort's boss and is about to blow the whistle on a circle of crooked flatfoots. Will Medavoy thwart Trask's trio and survive his colleagues' attempts to sabotage him? Former assistant DA Wood ( Gangland ) buries his knowledge of the law enforcement system under exaggerated plot developments and a denouement that is as numbingly predictable as it is moralistic. (Nov.)