Blaze

Former New York City police detective Leuci unleashes another torrid cop thriller that captures the gritty tension of police work and the criminal mindset without aggrandizing either. The title of Leuci's fourth novel refers to Blaze Longo, who plunders the streets of Brooklyn's Red Hook section, carrying a pouch around his neck containing ears severed from the many people he's maimed in his line of work: kidnapping for profit. On Blaze's bloody trail is police captain Nora Riter, a gifted big shot in the department who looks disarmingly like a beautiful hippie. She doesn't much like the Longo investigation, having few contacts in Red Hook's criminal underworld. Suspicious about why her boss assigned her to the case and distracted by her crumbling marriage, Riter needs help. It comes in the form of Nicky Ossman, a Red Hook native, struggling actor and petty thief who grew up with Blaze and knows how the thug, who's also a loan shark and ringleader, gained a stranglehold on the neighborhood. Together, Riter and Ossman devise an elaborate sting, one that crosses ethical as well as legal boundaries. Leuci, who in real life testified against several New York City cops in a landmark corruption trial popularized in Robert Daly's Prince of the City, moves the action along briskly, showing sentimentality toward no one. The cops are often just as bad as the criminals, while the criminals occasionally show traces of dignity and grace. Leuci (The Snitch; Fence Jumpers) falls back on the standard archetypes of the cop novel--the obsessively driven investigator, the squad room politics and sneaky tricks, the seemingly untouchable villain--and plenty of law-enforcement jargon. Yet he has the flavoring right in all the ingredients and keeps the focus on the characters, who, with their edgy realness, compensate for any predictable elements of the plot. (Nov.)