High Crimes: A Novel of Suspense

In this amateurishly written police procedural, two slothful neophyte detectives in the fictional Long Island town of Seaport, N.Y., run afoul of a Jamaican drug lord and police brass. Street cops Tree Nelson and Jimmy Tibaldi have still not passed their probationary period as detectives, but they're doing little to advance their careers. They treat their superiors with disrespect, hit the bars and come home with different women every time, and are believed (mistakenly) to be on the take. When they confront a thief on a rooftop, they really get into trouble. The man jumps to his death and his brother, Rastafarian drug dealer Gladstone Lanier, swears revenge. After Jimmy is shot in an ambush, it is up to Tree to stop Lanier and to salvage their reputations. Although Westermann is himself a policeman, in this first novel he is unable to translate his experience into a suspenseful story that conveys the many dimensions of real-life police work. What stands out about his policemen is their vulgarity, conveyed in their raunchy dialogue, crass behavior and absence of integrity. (September)