Dead Flowers

This gritty police procedural centers on the stereotypical good and bad cops at River Station, in the slums of an unnamed city. The good guys--homicide detectives Tony Lonto and Pat Runnion--are investigating the death of a florist (who was allergic to flowers) killed after picking up his latest shipment. The police at first assume that a robbery went wrong, but the detectives discover an incriminating link between the city's drug trade and the florist's delivery service. When a narcotics detective from River Station is found tortured and murdered, narcs Jake Gunnarson and Earl Koppel, the bad cops, conduct their own ``investigation'' into their colleague's murder, putting themselves on a course headed straight toward a confrontation with Lonto and Runnion. Will the good guys find the killers before the bad guys cover their tracks? The outcome is never in any doubt. Despite flat characterizations and stilted writing, Johnson ( Silver Street ), himself a prison inmate, clearly knows the drug trade and the mean streets he writes about. (June)