Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel (Fey Croaker Novels) [Hardcover]

Paul Bishop (Author)

Book Description

Series: Fey Croaker Novels | Publication Date: May 15, 2000

Top Los Angeles police detective Paul Bishop brings gripping authenticity and power to "Chalk Whispers," his poignant, revealing new Fey Croaker LAPD novel.

Never one to avoid a challenge, Fey knows she'll face both jealousy and hostility on her promotion to lieutenant in the elite Robbery-Homicide Division, but she and her team encounter something far more dangerous and disturbing when their first case is the torture-murder of prominent lawyer Bianca Flynn, the daughter of a judge and sister of one of Los Angeles's police commissioners.

Why did the authorities sit on this potentially high-profile case for three days, and what brought Flynn to such an unhappy end in an abandoned Hollywood warehouse? Fey and her crew -- the enigmatic married couple, Arch Hammersmith and Rhonda Lawless (a.k.a. Hammer and Nails), Brindle Jones and her partner, Alphabet Cohen, and Fey's second-in-command, Monk Lawson -- must search Bianca Flynn's past to try to find clues to her murder. One promising avenue is Bianca's work for an illegal underground railroad seeking to protect children from sexually predatory parents.

As the investigation twists into ever-tightening circles, Fey must also probe the strange death of Ellis Kavanaugh, one-time police force partner of Fey's abusive father. Is Kavanaugh's death connected to Flynn's? Why did the old man leave Fey a briefcase filled with hundred-dollar bills, and who chased him to his death beneath frightened horses on a racetrack?

In a novel that reaches into the past to illuminate the tragedies of today, Paul Bishop reveals a vulnerable, searching Fey Croaker readers have never seen before and will not soon forget. "Chalk Whispers" deliversa knock-out punch in this riveting series from an author who combines the hard-earned authority of the professional police officer with the narrative gift of the born storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fey Croaker, star of this and three previous mysteries in Paul Bishop's increasingly interesting series, has just been promoted to lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. Fey and her team have been reassigned to the elite Robbery-Homicide Department and charged with solving the high-profile slaying of Bianca Flynn, a prominent woman lawyer as well as the daughter of a powerful judge and the sister of a police commissioner.

Flynn's obsession with the victims of parental sexual abuse was clearly the motive for her murder, and this resonates at a very personal level with Fey, whose father molested her throughout her childhood. When Ellis "Jack" Kavanaugh, her father's former partner, dies and leaves her a fortune in marked bills traced to a robbery over two decades old, she is forced to confront a part of her past she believed she had come to terms with long ago. Unraveling the connection between Kavanaugh's cryptic dying words and the murder of Flynn, who ran an underground railroad for sexually threatened children, takes the tough but vulnerable Fey on a tumultuous personal journey. Her sojourn rivets the reader's attention and illuminates Bishop's skill at characterization as well as pace and plotting. While Fey is the soul of this excellent crime novel, the secondary figures are almost as compelling, particularly Hammer and Nails, the married detectives on Fey's crew, and Brink Kavanaugh, a charismatic artist to whom Fey is almost fatally attracted. Chalk Whispers confirms Bishop's place in the pantheon of writers like Joseph Wambaugh and Michael Connelly, as well as an earlier generation of pros like Ross MacDonald, who uncovered the corruption beneath Los Angeles's glossy exterior. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

Readers may smile the first time Bishop describes a character as "built like a bucket of gnarled fists." But when he depicts another as "having a face like a bucket of elbows," the warmed-over metaphor will function as a warning that this fourth Fey Croaker entry has lost the fire of previous installments. This time around, the female homicide lieutenant's world suffers from creative vapor lock--too much waggish cop banter; a cast of flat, predictable characters; and a plot that starts with a roar but then goes hoarse. The story opens with the tough-talking Croaker and her crew of five detectives being promoted to an elite homicide division within the Los Angeles Police Department. With the promotion, however, comes a sticky case--the torture murder of a prominent advocate for sexually abused children, whose father happens to be a California Supreme Court nominee and whose sister serves as an LAPD commissioner. As Fey's unit slowly makes progress, she finds herself haunted by the ghost of her father, a former cop and child molester who was mysteriously involved in circumstances, that now, 30 years later, seem related to her current investigation. It's a sordid, tangled case with several intriguing bypaths into the past, moving inexorably toward its conclusion with fervor but little surprise. Bishop (Tequila Mockingbird), a longtime LAPD detective currently specializing in sex crimes, writes convincingly about police procedures and the instincts of cops and crooks. Some of the relationships between characters here hint at a deeper dynamic, but then quickly pull back to their usual level, which all too often is comic caricature. Bishop is capable of better.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (May 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684830108
• ISBN-13: 978-0684830100
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,536,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A prolific writer, Paul Bishop is also a thirty-five year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, where he has twice been honored as Detective of the Year.

Aside from his numerous novels, Paul has written scripts for episodic television and feature films. As a nationally recognized interrogator, he co-starred on the hit ABC reality series Take The Money And Run.

His interview and interrogation seminar, Dancing With Pinocchio, is regularly scheduled by law enforcement, military, human resource, and legal organizations. Paul is also sought out as deception consultant, a motivational speaker, and writing teacher.

The Los Angeles Times has called Paul 'the closest equivalent of Joe Wambaugh yet,' and stated Hot Pursuit 'could hardly be better.' The New York Times proclaimed him a 'first-class writer,' and called Deep Water a 'lively, bloody adventure.' Publishers' Weekly cited Croaker: Kill Me Again, as 'gripping, intense, labyrinthine, complex, and compelling.' And author Dominick Dunne declared Croaker: Grave Sins to be a 'tough, taut, terrific tale!'

Paul's new novel, Fight Card: Felony Fists (written as Jack Tunney), has just been released. He can be found blogging at www.bishsbeat.blogspot.com/ and followed via twitter@bishsbeat.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fey Croaker gets promoted, April 28, 2003

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel (Fey Croaker Novels) (Mass Market Paperback)

Paul Bishop has been writing cop novels for about a decade now. He started with a book that was a better premise than a novel, about a pair of patrolmen trying to win a bet by driving their patrol car from LA to Las Vegas and back in one shift without anyone noticing. It wasn't quite as good as it sounds. He's written several books since, trying different characters. One was a detective who was also a soccer player or something. The one he seems to have finally decided is a hit is Fey Croaker, who gets called Frog Lady (frogs croak) and who's been assigned to LAPD's West Side Division for three books. In this fourth entry, the author appparently decided to up the ante and promote her, and her "team", to Robbery Homicide Division downtown.

This was the first of several annoyances in this book. I don't know this, but I suspect that LAPD is like any other large organization: they don't transfer teams like this around their department's organizational structure. Now there are mitigating circumstances: Bishop mentions an outgoing chief of police, and a new one trying to shake things up. Still it was hard for me to buy that they would do this.

Next, no sooner do Fey and her cohorts get downtown than they are assigned a real hot potato: the torture-murder of a prominent black woman who's an attorney and child molestation crusader, and also the sister of a police commissioner, and the daughter of a judge. Soon, the case develops into a hunt for missing children who have entered an "underground railroad" where they are spirited away from abusive parents who have the law on their side. Just in case things weren't complex enough, the case also takes a historical turn, with a bloody armored car robbery and a shootout involving the police and the Black Panthers from almost thirty years ago proving to be connected with the case.

There are interesting, if a bit eccentric, characters throughout the book. The cops are fun, and well-defined. The dialog is well-written. The plot is a bit like something Michael Connelly or Jeffrey Deaver would concoct. Everything's logical and believable, but at the end you wonder if anything this complex ever occurs, and if it does, do the detectives on the case ever solve them?

Given that, I did enjoy the book, and would recommend it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome!, March 2, 2002

By 

A. Avery "aoa47" (New Milford, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel (Fey Croaker Novels) (Mass Market Paperback)

This book had everything: intrigue, graphic details of a bloody murder, and the biting sarcasm of Fey Croaker. It is a true work of art. Ironically it was the first of the series I had read, so now I am scrambling to read the other books. To anybody who is a fan of the NBC TV show LAW & ORDER, I recomend this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Crime FIction Novel Of The Year, December 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Chalk Whispers: A Fey Croaker LAPD Crime Novel (Fey Croaker Novels) (Hardcover)

I try to read every cop fiction novel I can get my hands on. Wambough has always been my favorite author, but I found Paul Bishop to be more entertaining in this one. I've been a cop for 18 years, and enjoyed the realistic cop humor.