{"id":6386,"date":"2017-02-20T09:24:53","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T14:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6386"},"modified":"2017-02-20T09:24:53","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T14:24:53","slug":"what-you-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6386","title":{"rendered":"*****What You Break"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Long

photo: Shinya Suzuki, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Reed Farrel Coleman \u2013 <\/strong>Coleman\u2019s latest crime novel is the second to feature retired Suffolk County cop John Augustus (Gus) Murphy. Coleman portrays his Long Island environment so well that his books carry a gritty realism and his characters live real, if doggedly unglamorous, lives. Says Washington Post <\/em>reviewer Patrick Anderson<\/a>, \u201cHis Long Island is scruffy, blue-collar, corrupt, choked by traffic and fueled by fast food, cheap beer and unrelenting anger. Jay Gatsby isn\u2019t in the picture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murphy is the security detail and after-hours van driver for the ironically named Paragon Hotel, located near Long Island\u2019s MacArthur airport, and its night spot, the Full Flaps Lounge. His girlfriend Magdalena calls it a third-class hotel\u2014\u201cSecond-class,\u201d he corrects her. The job\u2019s easy and doesn\u2019t require any emotional investment. In other words, he can stay on auto-pilot, as he has been in almost every arena of his life since the sudden death of his 20-year-old son, a centerpiece of the earlier book.<\/p>\n

The pain of losing his son and all the consequent chaos in his personal life has not gone away, but he\u2019s managing it better now. The downside is that Murphy\u2019s a bit less conscientious about his own safety than he perhaps ought to be, with two separate catastrophes looming on his personal horizon. He\u2019s called in to investigate the apparently motiveless death of a young Vietnamese woman and he fingers one of the hotel guests as potential trouble. Correctly.<\/p>\n

Murphy pokes the beast with inquiries into Linh Trang\u2019s past and the hotel guest\u2019s intentions, which puts him and possibly even Magdalena in jeopardy from rough and\u00a0 determined characters. The plot moves quickly as the circle of people involved in both cases widens, ultimately reaching an inspired conclusion.<\/p>\n

Award-winning author Coleman is also a poet, so it\u2019s no surprise he\u2019s been called the \u201cnoir<\/em> poet laureate.\u201d He paints compelling scenes and circumstances, as well as complex psychological portraits.\u00a0 If you like non-stop action thrillers that nevertheless have some intellectual weight, this is a book to pick up and enjoy.
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