Lieberman's Folly
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- $129.00
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- $129.00
Descripción editorial
The first novel in a crime series about "two Chicago cops, one Jewish, one Irish . . . Told with deceptive simplicity [and] a gentle wit" (The Boston Globe).
Detectives Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan have been partners a long time—long enough to call each other "Rabbi" and "Father Murphy." Lieberman is sixty, a grandfather, and a devout Jew. Hanrahan is a lapsed Catholic who's been hitting the bottle pretty heavily ever since his wife walked out on him. They may be flawed, but they're good cops. But even good cops have bad days.
On a hot Chicago afternoon, Lieberman would prefer to be watching his beloved Cubs from the bleachers at Wrigley Field instead of sitting in his brother Maish's deli with Hanrahan, meeting a prostitute and valued informant. But Estralda Valdez needs their protection from a psychotic john, and the partners agree to watch her back on their off-duty time.
That Friday night, while Lieberman is in temple, Hanrahan has the first watch, across the street from Estralda's apartment in a Chinese restaurant. But while he passes the time with two doubles and flirts with the waitress, the beautiful prostitute is brutally murdered. Tortured by guilt and chewed out by their chief, Lieberman and Hanrahan race against the clock to find the killer. They owe at least that much to Estralda.
Lieberman's Folly is "first-rate work, featuring characters you can almost touch and streets you can almost walk on, and an expertly plotted story" (The Phildelphia Inquirer).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An overabundance of irrelevant character vignettes impedes Kaminsky's (Toby Peters and Inspector Rostnikov series) procedural, which features the partnership of Chicago cops Abe ``Rabbi'' Lieberman and Bill ``Father Murphy'' Hanrahan. When prostitute Estralda Valdez, a past informer, asks the pair for protection, tippler Hanrahan agrees to watch her apartment from a Chinese restaurant across the street. After Valdez is murdered during Hanrahan's watch, he and Lieberman investigate her death, despite the objections of their captain, who is unhappy about negative publicity; they were off duty while they were protecting Estralda and she was only a prostitute, after all. In pursuing the case, the cops encounter a variety of characters, each supplied with copious background. Yet because of the profuse but scattershot surface details, no one-- not even the major characters-- is believable. In fact, the wealth of unfocused information tends to irritate rather than illuminate. Inconsistencies also plague the story, especially when Valdez's mysterious sister, a key ingredient to the plot, is found among a group of characters with whom the detectives should have been familiar. Edgar Award-winner Kaminsky ( A Cold Red Sunrise ) is a facile writer working over a trite tale.
