Customer Reviews

Counterplay

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

I have read and loved the Butch Karp series from the very beginning, and I was one of the many readers disappointed when Michael Gruber (the apparent ghostwriter of the books) ended his involvement. Without Mr. Gruber, the series has lost its voice. The last three books -- "Hoax", "Fury" and now "Counterplay" -- have been terrible. I can't really review this book because, for the first time in my life, I actually returned it to the store after reading only the first two chapters. I simply found it too painful to go on -- the plot was ridiculous and the writing about as colorful as an insurance brochure. Like some of the other reviewers, I was horrified by the incorrect references to previous books and extremely depressed by the dilution and distortion of the once rich and zany characters. I would rather "close the book" on the series and grieve the loss of some of my favorite characters than read another lame attempt to keep them alive by someone who apparently hasn't even read the previous books -- and who certainly doesn't have the talent to keep the series going. My advice to anyone else who feels this way is to go back to the beginning and read "No Lesser Plea" -- In other words, get the bad taste out of your mouth and enjoy what was great about this once-brilliant series.

I could not imagine that Counterplay would be worse than Fury but oh how wrong I was: a convulted, no, an idiotic plot; ridiculous characters (this book has appearances by almost every character appearing in earlier books;) a pathetic "relevance" by tying the bad guy in Fury to Al Qaeda; plot developments furthered by heretofore hidden Karp relatives who are Russian mobsters explained in tediously long, nonsensical narratives; the Karp/Ciampi duo foiling yet another terrorist attempt at mass murder in the Big Apple; etc.

The first books of the series were ghost written by Michael Gruber, a fact noted by Tanenbaum who dedicated most of these books to Gruber in acknowledgement of his contribution. The truly terrible quality of the last three books, culminating in Counterplay, makes it clear that Gruber is no longer assisting in the writing. I can't believe that these books have been professionally edited.

The plot is absolutely ridiculous (Tanenbaum asks us to believe that Al Qaeda would align itself in planning a terrorist attack with Kane, the imprisoned bad guy from Fury, because he also sells illegal arms. Kane is clearly insane and carries more baggage than any dozen other arms dealers together but we are asked to believe that al Qaeda links up with him, breaking him out of custody and thus arousing all of NY's police and of course the Catholic Church which Kane savaged.)

Almost every character from previous books has been brought back but in a context that makes it seem, as another reviewer has noted, that Tanenbaum didn't read the earlier books. For example one character, John Jojoba, a reformed alcoholic who committed to sobriety to properly raise his son and who spent Fury having a spiritual battle against his old Viet Cong nemesis (who just happens to be Marlene's old buddy Tran, what a coincidence!!)in Counterplay has Tran as a drinking buddy. Or Lucy, who in Absolute Rage tells her boyfriend that her amazing liguistic abilities are dependent on her remaining a virgin, is in Counterplay and Fury, without explanation, living and fornicating with Ned, a highschool drop out but a sharpshooter with a sixgun.

Worse than the bad writing, idiotic plot, ridiculous characters and ludicrous coincidences is that Tanenbaum can no longer write a good trial story, which was once his forte. In Counterplay, Karp takes second seat in a murder prosecution in support of his old buddy Guma (brought back in Fury)on a case that the Karp of the Michael Gruber books would have laughed out of the office. It is, in fact, the complete reverse of what Karp preached repeatedly in earlier books: DAs go to trial on what they can prove, not to achieve justice. Guma and Karp want "justice" for a murder victim and take a case to trial that is devoid of provable evidence (they don't even have a body.)

Save your money. Don't buy this book. Don't support this kind of rip off by an author/publisher. This is bad stuff. If we don't buy it, they won't publish it.

I hardly know where to start! Not a single character was consistent with who they were in the past. Lucy, the twins, Marlene, Butch, Guma, nobody. Tran used to be so formal and mysterious, and now he's a beer-drinkin' buddy of John Jojola??? Lucy was wonderfully introspective, and spiritual and now she's reduced to a sex fiend. The dogs that Marlene trains were always Neopolitan Mastiffs, for crying out loud! Why the heck didn't some editor notice all these inconsistencies? The villain, Andrew Kane, spends an awful lot of time giggling maniacally, and yet no one identifies him as the madman he is. This book goes beyond suspending disbelief, which I'm always willing to do for a good story, and into the realm of the absurd. And somebody PLEASE explain to me the use of all the italics. It was so hard to read -- did the word processor lose the ability to use simple punctuation like quotation marks? AARRGGHH! Please, do not waste your money on this book. If you feel that you cannot go without reading the entire series -- which I have LOVED for years, by the way -- then just get it from the library, but not as a rental!

Before buying this book I read all the other reviews, but I decided to buy the book anyway, as I have long been devoted to the adventures Butch Karp and his family. Please, read the other reviews and resist the impulse to buy this - the writing is haphazard, the plot is extremely disjointed (as well as implausible) and the end result is just plain dissatisfaction. There are much better books out there!

The jacket blurb for this book refers to it as the third in a trilogy - trilogy, schmilogy. I adore the characters and plots in the earlier, non-trilogy Karp/Ciampi books, but this is just sad. Not only are the characters flat, but they now exhibit radical memory loss as well as personality disorders. Lucy - one of the most interestingly developed characters in popular fiction -- has turned into a dim, bean-eating sex addict. For this alone Tanenbaum should be shot at dawn. The errors, as other reviews point out, are staggering. Whoever the new ghost is, he/she hasn't read the earlier books or taken English 101. Shame, Tanenbaum, both you and the hack you rode in on.

I agree with all the negative reviews here, but there's something else that really puzzles me. I've also been a great fan of the Karp/Ciampis, and have always admired Tanenbaum's impeccable style, caustic humor and sharp characters. What happened? This is like a book by another person. It's a clumsy potboiler. Moreover, it's riddled with grammatical errors and typos, and what's the reason for the arbitrary use of italics? It makes no sense at all. Even Marlene's beloved Italian Mastiffs have been replaced by Presa Canarios, another cheap shot, as Presas were big in the news a while ago because two of them killed a woman in San Francisco in a highly publicized case involving two bent lawyers with connections among prisoners, who were probably raising dogs for meth lab guards. Even there, Marlene's dogs were much larger than Presas; the ones in the news were bred with mastiffs to increase their bulk. It's really as though this book were written by a B-grade writer, commissioned by Tanenbaum. I wonder if there's some taint of the movie industry here. But no more Tanenbaum books for me until this is addressed.

i checked this book out from the library, and i still felt UNBELIEVABLY ripped off! i think that Mr. Tannenbaum should write a personal check to refund to everyone who spent the time to read this book. Never mine that i didn't buy the thing. I bought every one on of the "Karp series" until now. I won't bother to read another one.

It's obvious that Tanenbaum had a ghostwriter for the earlier books...they were funny, had great plots, and a lot of character development. The latest ones in the series were just pathetic. I bagged them all up and tried to trade them in for credit at our local used book store. They didn't want them. I'm taking them to Powell's tomorrow but they'll probably laugh me right out of the place. Next stop?

GOODWILL.

I was finally able to find this at the library, because I won't spend money on this series again. What really struck me in this one is how incredibly dull it is. A great deal of print is taken up by recounting the story of the last 2 books. Yes, there's a lot of intrigue and plotting and violence, but it's all so much of the same that it's boring. What would be horrendous, life-stopping occurences in real life are simply related as ho-hum incidentals. Massacred school children? Murdered police officers? Saudi prince blown up against his will? Characters suffer knives in the back, gunshot wounds. A horse breaks its leg and has to be put down? A dog tears out someone's throat? Someone's knee being shot to pieces? Keep moving, life goes on!

One of the saddest things about the last 3 books of the series is how the author approaches violence. The Gruber-written books explored the effect of violence on characters - the pain and physical effect on victims, the emotional effect of committing violence, and the moral effects. Death was horrible and important, and characters wrestled with their consciences - this was a key point in Marlene's character in particular. In the last 3 books, scores of dead bodies litter the landscape, and the characters proceed blithely through it, wisecracking away, with hardly a glance at the blood and mess, let alone the moral consequences.

The plot is a mess, far-fetched and ludicrous, and in the end, just simply laughable. What IS Kane's goal, anyway? Kill the Karps, Kidnap the Pope, only to run away to a penthouse in Tehran and make Lucy have his babies? We're to believe that Andrew Kane plotted for months to make Lucy the centerpiece of his Evil Plan, even though he had never met her? And although he's infiltrated both Al Qaeda AND the Department of Homeland Security, he has to send his second in commmand to perform such minor tasks as stabbing a priest and blowing up a hot dog vendor at Brighton Beach? And how does he command such loyalty from the hundreds, no, thousands of minions that follow his orders without question, when he treats them so badly they all hate him?

There is an inconsistency of tone that makes characters seem wildly inappropriate. The scene where Lucy and Ned are ambushed in the cabin veers, in the space of two pages, from distress at Ned's gunshot injury to lechery and sexual bantering. Lucy actually teases Ned that the villans want her "alive and wiggling" to do "unspeakable" things to her body - is that creepy or what? After a bit of cheap melodrama - "I don't want to live without you" - Lucy fearfully remembers her rape and torture from Resolved, and then, without missing a beat, tells her lover she's "all hot and bothered," and, in response, he compares her to a "li'l mare in heat." Whew! That's some relationship!

The Andrew vs. Andy scene actually made me laugh out loud.

The writing in this book isn't as comically bad as it is in Hoax and Fury - but it's still pretty bad. The author continues to overuse "However" and "apparently". There is a cliched laziness to the use of metaphors that are now so old-fashioned they make no sense. What New Yorker of 2007 would say someone is "wet behind the ears"? A metaphor about the birth of farm animals isn't likely to come to the lips of an urban-bred law enforcement officer. And surely a writer could come up with a better metaphor for 2 people struggling in WATER than socks tumbling in a DRYER?

And I don't know whether Lucy's story about Spuyten Duyvil is actual folklore, but I've never met a trumpeter who could play his instrument while swimming in a turbulent river! Sounds like a Monty Python routine.

The use of italics is annoying and doesn't make sense. The cliff-hanger ending is a cheap stunt. Apparently (as the author would say) there is more to come. This series is now getting so bad that it's starting to be fun.

I tried, I really tried to maintain the increasingly fragile link in the chain holding back disbelief. But the end of this book -- particularly the totally out-to-lunch, inaccurate "dissociative identity disorder," deus ex machina section -- was too much. The chain broke, the dam burst, and disbelief thundered in. That's the sad thing. I've loved this series and the family's exploits for years, but will no longer buy the books -- have felt cheated on the last two, with their increasingly Hollywood-style endings. I wait and borrow from the library; that way I don't want to set Tran and John Jojola on Mr. Tanenbaum. While the international politics and Homeland Security aspects hold grains of truth, and we can no longer sleep easily, the cartoonish presentation of black hat/white hat characters and their actions is an affront to long-time fans of the series.

Mr. Tanenbaum needs to stop dining out on the good old days, and spend some time in Taos, re-thinking the believability of this ensemble's experiences and their world.