Customer Reviews

Fence Jumpers: a novel

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This book is stays with you long after you finish. It is rare for a novel to be so real, so affecting, but this is. Anyone interested in police work, NYC or more important, friendship and betrayal, should rush out and get this brillant book. You will never forget it. Leuci is a magnificent writer

This is a deceptively long book, filled with atmosphere, and lacking much in the way of plot. Jimmy Burns, JoJo Paradiso, and Dante O'Donnell grew up in the same neighborhood, and now Burns and O'Donnell are cops on the Organized Crime Task Force, conducting surveillance on Paradiso and his buddies. Paradiso is the son of the local Don, and while said Don is aging and slowing down, he still controls things enough to make his prohibition against the family doing business with drug dealers or dealing drugs themselves. JoJo wants to overturn this and go into the drug business in a big way, in order to make money, so he's scheming behind his father's back.

This comprises the first half of the book. By the time the plot actually got going, I was pretty bored. The atmosphere is well-done, and the characters are interesting. When the plot does get going, however, it's almost totally predictable and takes way too long to get where it's going, especially since the first half of the book took so long to get to that point anyway. I enjoyed this book somewhat, but calling it a mystery or a suspense novel is a stretch to say the least.