Customer Reviews

The Big Show

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you want to know what New Orleans is really like, if you want to see how police officers deal with the most horrible crimes, if you want to read about real police officers, then READ THIS BOOK. If you're looking for Hollywood versions of cops, if you're looking for in-depth studies of criminal's minds, if you're looking for Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest or other New Orleans tourist things, then there is no reason to read THE BIG SHOW.

Veteran Homicide Detective Dino LaStanza turns the wrong way down a one-way street and almost runs over a burning man stumbling across a quite uptown street. LaStanza burns his hands putting the fire out. The man dies and for the next 320 pages, LaStanza works elentlessly to solve this heinous crime. Meanwhile, LaStanza and his partner Jodie Kintyre must catch a serial rapist who murdered his last victim.

This is life in the big pressure cooker, in the overworked New Orleans Police Homicide Division, the big show of police work.

! ! The streets of New Orleans are never better described than in De Noux's work, a former homicide detective. These books are not for everyone. They are uncompromising in their portrayal of cops who would never win a popularity contest. Years of witnessing violence has effected them. They see life differently than we do. De Noux shows this from the inside.

What De Noux doesn't do is glorify the killers. In THE BIG SHOW, we don't get into the killer's heads, we see them only as the police see them. We walk the streets, talk to real New Orleanians, see how cops use gallows humor (which De Noux does better than anyone) to release the tremendous tension that comes with the job of hunting killers.

LaStanza is unique. He's Sicilian-American, born of immigrants into a city whose culture is still dominated by ancient families. Unlike clichéd cops who drink too much or who are down-and-out bachelors roaming the streets like alley cats, LaStanza is not an alcoholic and is ma! ! rried (luckily to a rich woman). He gets to drive a Masera! ti (which was stolen in the previous book on this series, pretty damn funny because LaStanza was cocky enough to drive it around the seedier parts of town). His wife, Lizette, is far smarter than LaStanza (she's a graduate student) and an extremely sexy woman. This may frighten some readers, because Lizette knows the power of her sex. Sometimes, she's too much like a Playboy bunny, but this IS fiction. Few writers can write a sex scene as steamy as De Noux.

What De Noux does here is put a working class cop in a mansion with a beatutiful wife and servants, providing LaStanza with an automatic inner conflict. It bothers him to be rich. He leaves this comfortable life every morning for the bloody streets. It's typical New Orleans, rich vs. poor, uptown vs. inner city, Sicilian-American vs. everyone else.

The other suppporting characters are very nteresting. Jodie Kintyre, LaStanza's deadly serious partner, is a methodical, committed detectives with great inner streng! ! th. Paul Snowood, the cowboy wannabe, constantly provides humorous relief (sometimes annoyingly). Stan-The-Man Smith is even more annoying, a scene-stealer who sometimes lives up to his nickname of Psycho. The killers are chilling because, as in real police work, we only see them briefly, in violent snapshots. We don't get much about the victim's lives either, again because cops don't have time for a biography of their victim. Cops are too busy trying to catch the killer.

This book isn't perfect. The publishing house did a poor job of proof reading and spell checking this book. Then again, it's a new publishing house, so they should learn from this.

De Noux doesn't pull punches with language. Laced with the profane language of the street, THE BIG SHOW is not for children nor for anyone interested in profound literature. It's a too real for that.

I highly recommend this book. If you like reading Joseph Wambaugh, Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke, then you'll li! ! ke reading this book.

I'm a woman, so don't think this bo! ok is only for men. JUST READ THIS BOOK.

The Big Show is number 5 in a hardboiled series about a New Orleans homicide cop named Dino LaStanza, who is loosely based on the author, an ex homicide cop himself. I've bought them all. I've read them all. And I don't have any extra time or money to waste. They're genuine, and compelling. The only reason I give this one a four star rating is because I actually prefer a couple of others in the series a little better, particularly Crescent City Kills and Blue Orleans.

Charles Gramlich
Author of Cold in the Light

If you're looking for a realistic portrayal of New Orleans and police work or just a good read, THE BIG SHOW is for you. O'Neil De Noux's fifth La Stanza novel, THE BIG SHOW, is not only long overdue, but also a breath of fresh air.

As a long time New Orleans resident, I am tired of travelogue novels that only describe the sections of the Crescent City and Louisiana that you see in movies, TV shows, guided tours and Julie Smith novels. De Noux takes the reader into the mean streets of the city and introduces to the real characters that inhabit the city, not white-suited stereotypes speaking with implausible accents and dialect. De Noux maintains the same level of realism in his portrayal of police work. Homicide cases are not always clear-cut, interconnected and quickly solved. Police work is tedious and grueling work that exposes officers to the worst that mankind has to offer. This explains the twisted characters that inhabit De Noux's novels. ! ! To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, they may not be good men, but they're the best in their world.

"Snowood and Stevens avoided the Pantyhose case like the plague."

The above quote sort of sums up "The Big Show" for me - the parts that aren't just plain trite are clichés. "The Big Show" is O'Neil De Noux's fourth offering starring New Orleans Homicide Detective Dino LaStanza, and this one is so bad that I'm revising my opinion of the other three books, too.

Not that the other three were actually any good, but they had a sort of exuberant stupidity that made not liking them hard - sort of like an "Ace Ventura" movie. De Noux is a former homicide cop himself, so I found myself accepting the fact that the stories lacked plot, grammar, narrative focus and a spellchecker, and enjoyed the fact that I was getting an authentic voice. The rules have changed, however.

From the inside cover of "The Big Show", we now learn from De Noux's bio that he "teaches mystery writing at Tulane University College and is the founding editor of two fiction magazines..." Uh-oh. Now the rules have changed. We're being asked to take De Noux seriously as a writer. That's hard for me to do when the writer in question writes in sentence fragments, shows a preoccupation with adolescent sexual fantasies and creates cliche's instead of characters...

"The Big Show" centers around LaStanza's search for an arsonist-murderer and his partner's hunt for a rapist-murderer, nicknamed "The Pantyhose Rapist". Along the way, we get a glimpse of what real police work must be like - endless canvassing of neighborhoods, uncooperative witnesses, administrative roadblocks. But we never get a sense of anyone - we don't get to know the victims, so we never develop any sympathy for them. The cops, LaStanza included, are almost universally unlikeable. The only person even remotely sympathetic is Jodie Kintyre, LaStanza's partner, and that's not enough to carry the book. As in previous books, Snowood and Stevens, two homicide dicks, are prese! nted as comedic relief, but serve only to irritate.

De Noux's ineptitude with characterization is exemplified in Byron Norwood, a suspect in the arson-murder. Norwood is a David Duke-like former white supremacist who has come into money and is running for governor. Rather than create a personality for Norwood, De Noux simply steals that of Jay Gatsby and has Norwood prance around calling LaStanza "Old Sport" and mixing gimlets.

LaStanza himself is a weak link, written as every cops wet dream. Early in the series, LaStanza marries into an incredibly wealthy family and spends his time tooling around New Orleans in his brand-new Maserati, lounging in his jacuzzi and having his meals prepared by a uniformed maid. His wife, the amazingly wealthy Lizette, is like an animated blow-up sex doll - all libido and servitude.

I strongly urge you not to waste your time or money on this book.