Customer Reviews

Bloody London

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

 

 

Dear Amazon, I was disappointed to see that you had posted the netative Kirkus review, but not the very positive Starred Publishers Weekly which goes like this: "Red Mercury Blues and Hot Poppies, Nadelson's first two books about Russian-born New York cop Artie Cohen were colorful but basically conventional mysteries. In her third book (Bloody London) the author makes a major leap forward in scope and depth. The novel-a harrowing take on the sickness that seeped out of Russian following the collapse of communism and infected New York and London--offers a frightrening, apocalyptic vision of two cities drowning in success. Characters we've met before have grown and changed: Artie, still carrying several loads of immigrant baggage from his journey to Moscow to Israel to New York, is no longer a cop, but a PI, doing special jobs for a much subdued Sonny Lippert, his mentor, who's a federal prosecutor. Artie's lover, Lily Hanes, now the mother of an adopted chinese baby girl, is worried that Artie's current case--looking into a Russian connection to the murder of a wealthy and powerful Englishman who ruled his exclusive Sutton Place co-op with a ruthless hand-might stir up some old secrets of her own, especially about her ex-husband, who has found a way to profit from the homeless. And Tolya Sverdloff, Cohen's charming and connniving friend from the streets of Moscow and Brighton Beach, is now a high-flying player in some brutal financial games, worried enough to have a secret steel-walled safe room carved into his apartment. The scenes set in new York City are taut and sharply etched, but the novel really takes off--into Nathaniel West country--when Artie follows Lily to a a London ready to burst from catastrophic rains and the accumulated poisons of decades of official greed and neglect. This is a powerful portrait of cities and people, wobbling on the edge. (Publishers Weekly, November 22, l999) STARRED REVIEW. I would be delighted if you would post this and perhaps take out the Kirkus.

Reggie Nadelson's latest brings back her Russian/American hero Artie Cohen as a private eye. Artie is worldly-wise, soulful, and not above making up the rules as he goes along. Nadelson's New York and London are pitch-perfect, her plot appropriately labyrinthine, and her best heroines are at once beautiful, wised-up, willful, and--intriguingly--over 40. If you like intelligently written mysteries that keep one eye on the headlines--Michael Connelly comes to mind--you're going to love this.

Former Russian citizen, Artie Cohen left NYPD to become a private investigator. Much of his work comes from Sonny Lippert, who asks Artie to investigate a Manhattan murder of a British expatriate Tommy Pascoe. The assailant tried to remove the victim's head before leaving the deceased to swim in an exclusive Sutton Place pool.

Artie begins to investigate the murder and soon finds a Russian connection that sends the sleuth into Brooklyn. Other killings follow and lead Artie to London where the city seems on the verge of annihilation or exhilaration depending on where you sit in the food chain.

BLOODY LONDON, the third Artie Cohen mystery is a puissant tale that focuses on the decade-old aftermath of the collapse of Communism on New York and London. Artie remains a charming but wild mix while his girlfriend Lily seems stronger than previously depicted. The who-done-it is entertaining as Artie falls in love with the decadent, exciting, and pendulum-like swinging London. Though Reggie Nadelson makes Artie seem too lyrical at times, this doesn't prevent fans or readers new to this exciting series (see RED HOT BLUES and HOT POPPIES) from enjoying the maturing of the characters as the tale twists into new areas.

The first half of the book, set in New York, wasn't particularly convincing. The second half, set in London, was ridiculuous. It sounds like it was written by someone who spent a weekend in London after reading an article in an inflight magazine on the Thames Barrier. The attempt to evoke a sense of impending doom by describing Londoners packing a supermarket, with kids tearing open packets of M&Ms is about as convincing as "the young cop struggl[ing] to inflate a dinghy by blowing on its tube like it was a balloon. His face swelled up with effort". Puhlease! A shortwave radio for weather reports? In London?

If Reggie Nadelson wants to write a weather catastrophe novel, maybe she should stick to North Carolina or Florida.

Of course everyone gets to live happily ever after at the end, even though none of the real baddies have been brought to book, and they're supposed to be the sort of ruthless characters who will have you killed for looking at them crooked.

It's rare that I give up on a book as fast as I did this one, but life's too short to plough through writing this dismal. On page one I doubt if there was even a single sentence with more than four words in it, and the writing conveyed just that - words, no significance, just letters strung together to make dull words. My review of this single page has taken more time than I had ever hoped to spend again on this book after I left it lying on a table in a university lounge. Call it altruism. Anyway, perhaps some spaced-out student would get some pleasure out of it. They say that drugs can do that, you know.