Customer Reviews

First Avenue

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is as fine a debut novel as you will come across and is one of the better police novels I have read in many years! I say that without qualification and I have read many a mystery novel and police procedural. This one is excellent and what is so surprising is that this book is the author's first effort!

The author, Lowen Clausen, spent 13 years with the Seattle PD. Obviously, his main character, Sam, is his literary version of himself. The way Mr. Clausen develops this character, as well as the second figure, a young female officer who is new to the police department is what makes this novel a thinking reader's police story. To be sure, this is not your bang-bang, action-packed police procedural. There are no "unbelievable" scenes or conversations. Although pacing is not the quickest of what would be expected and found in this type of story, Mr. Clausen does a fine job moving this story forward in a way that will keep the reader involved and concerned.

The main character is a police officer who routinely patrols First Ave. in Seattle before it was gentrified. The average reader may not know enough about Seattle history to know when that happened and Clausen does not say, but that's okay. Sam is a policeman who almost seems to be a character out of place and out of his element. He is, somewhat incongruously, a poetry writing patrolman. That alone sets him apart from his fellow officers and unlike the other career members of the force, he has taken college courses at the University of Washington in of all things, literature.

The plot here revolves around the finding of a dead baby and the questions it raises about the location of the mother. Sam and a couple of other "concerned police officers" decide to pursue what few leads they have in an attempt to close the case. They want to close it not just to fill a square and because the rules say they must, but for the simple reason that Sam vaguely knew the mother and was also aware that she would never abandon her infant child.

Clausen very effectively uses scene and descriptions of the locale to create mood, tension, relief and and the very end, closure. Had I never been to Seattle, this book would have served as an excellent primer on what I might expect to find when I did get there.

In addition to the attempts to find the young mother of the dead baby, Clausen interjects the possibility of high level corruption, dissolute heirs to newspaper fortunes and drug smuggling. He does an exceptional job of blending all of the disparate plot elements together to create an outstanding story and one that leaves you feeling for the main characters when the book ends.

This is not your typical police novel. But then, it doesn't have to be. Mr. Clausen is a talented and accomplished writer who will probably defy typecasting. This book shows that he will be able to transcend genre labeling and I hope we see more of his work very soon.

Paul Connors

I am Lowen's Little Brother in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, and I want to tell you what I like about this story. I like First Avenue because of the way Lowen Clausen made the characters seem to tell everything that went on in their lives. Sam, one of the important characters, seems to live a life that has no problems. He is also a man who wants to avoid looking at his past or future. But that all changes when he finds a dead baby in a hotel room. The image of the baby won't leave his mind, and the only way for the image to leave is if he finds out what happened.

This story is more than a shoot-em-up cop story. This story is sure to give you a taste of life in Seattle and what it is like to be a cop for a major city. Lowen wanted to write, and that's what he will be doing.

This is a well-crafted story of policework in Seattle, solving a mystery along the way and introducing a cast of likable characters based on real life.

Growing up in Seattle the locales are spot-on, and the times well-portrayed (the image of the cop as a student-by-day, policeman-by-night, and unable to tell either group of friends about the other, is a perfect metaphor).

The main character of Sam, the beat cop who writes poetry in his slack times, is a wonderful antidote to the hardboiled cop stereotype and, to some large degree, appears to be autobiographical. Lowen Clausen, from the reading I attended last week, appears to be that "cop with a soul."

Recommended without reservation.

This was one of the best police procedurals I have read in quite some time. The characters were down-to-earth and believable. It wasn't your rough-em-up, shoot-em-up novel that is so typical of some of today's authors. Sam Wright is an average, everyday working man, minus the tough-talking self congratulatory conceitedness that you find in many fictional protagonists. The author carried this story from beginning to end, finely weaving all the details of the story and bringing them together wonderfully. Nothing about this book was overstated or overdone. I hope Clausen continues to write more in the same manner as this one.

I just finished reading First Avenue ten minutes ago and just had to say something about it. I'm not a literary guru, but there's some real down-to-earth feeling in this book that I've seldom experienced. Lowen Clausen has managed to mix the gritty and many-times depressing feeling of First Avenue with a caring and sensitive storyline. This is not the typical cop story. In fact, the cop story almost fades in comparison to the real underlying story of the characters. It's a thinking man's cop story! I'm hoping for many more Lowen Clausen stories... this book really touched me!

First time author Lowen Clausen has skillfully drawn characters that are sympathetic and quite real. First Avenue is Clausen's first book, and the former Seattle police officer places much of the story on First Avenue and around Pike's Market.

The storyline accurately emphasizes the low-key relationships that a beat cop will establish with the everyday citizens, both the good and the bad, who inhabit his territory.

Clausen is a good writer and the story has the rich detail that only a real cop could put into a crime story. On the other hand, the story is just too low key. For sure, most police yarns have action that is far over the top, but in First Avenue, Clausen has gone the other way. In the end, the book is a well-written, ultra slow paced yawner.

I just finished First Avenue...and as a Seattle Police officer I felt the author truly reflected another side of police work the public rarely glimpses. Lowen Clausen developed a story around a part of Seattle's culture and "otherside" that only an officer often views. I greatly appreciated the humanity and emotions of his character Sam. Author, former police officer Clausen took the warriors mask off and gave the reader ar ride-along in the reality of an officer's world.

"First Avenue" provides a remarkable and heartbreakingly realistic view of a section of downtown Seattle with a story of goodness and black evil.

Officer Sam Wright finds a dead infant in a run-down hotel on First Avenue. Sam has seen many things but the image of this child who died of malnutricion, is something he won't forget. He learns that the child's mother worked at the nearby Donut Shop but has disappeared.

As he begins the paperwork at police headquarters, he wonders about the hopelessness that seems to exist with the people he came into contact with at the hotel where he found the baby.

There seems to be a connection to the Donut Shop and in an unusual coincidence, a young woman, not much more than a girl, comes to Seattle looking for Sam. She seems timid and when she passes the Donut Shop, she gets a job there.

Sam's favorite place on First Avenue is Silvie's Restaurant where he often stops in to relax when off duty. Sam has seen the young woman at the Donut Shop but she didn't say she had been looking for him. He has learned her name is Marie and asks Silvie if he would be willing to hire her since Sam feels that the Donut Shop is unsafe.

Lowen Clausen's manner of writing is descriptive and, at times, poetic, "She laughed for a moment, but her laughter startled her as though waking from a dream. He watched her eyes go sad."

I was moved by Clausen's characters. Some of the coldhearted criminals were so evil that I wanted to express some anger with them. At the same time, there are a number of well meaning people, including Sam, attempting to make life a little better with their compassionate manner and desire to help.

This is a wonderful adventure, written by a former Seattle police officer so that the reader feels they are sitting in the passenger seat of the police cruiser, watching events unfold.

This is a recommendation for one of the best novels I've read this year.

FIRST AVENUE is Lowen Clausen's debut novel. An ex-police office himself, Lowen writes in a style reminiscent of another cop-turned-scribbler, Joseph Wambaugh.

Officer Sam Wright is a uniformed patrol officer in 1980's Seattle. His morning beat is the north end of FIRST AVENUE - particularly, and for the purpose of the plot, around the Pike Place Market. In the book, the avenue is only just beginning to be rehabilitated into its present day tourist and shopping mecca. In Sam's world, it's still on the sleazy, pre-Starbucks edge. In this context, Officer Wright becomes involved with the probe into the death of a young infant, apparently left by its mother, Alberta, to die of dehydration in a squalid hotel room. Having had a previous fleeting contact with the mother and baby, and convinced that the abandonment was not intentional, Wright is convinced that Alberta is also the victim of foul play. Soon, his investigations focus on a crummy donut shop across from the Market's entrance run by a slimeball named Pierre. No Winchell's here.

This is one of those books about which I'm feeling guiltily ambivalent. In remaining true to my own feelings, I'm afraid of being unfair. On one hand, Clausen has skillfully drawn characters that are sympathetic to the reader. The storyline accurately emphasizes the low key, almost non-existent, drama of a big city police beat, and the relationships that a beat cop will establish with the everyday citizens, both good and bad, that inhabit his territory. In FIRST AVENUE, the crime under investigation is almost incidental. It's certainly quaint when compared to the sensational crimes that flood 21st century newspapers, and which serve as the fodder for so many other crime thrillers. Intellectually, I can say that the author did a first-rate job recreating the physical and human environment of that Seattle location at that point in time. On the other hand, my eyelids, which kept closing every ten pages or so as I was reading, tell me that perhaps the book is just too low key. Maybe it's just me, too jaded from previous potboilers with way-too-clever endings and an excess of unlikely action.

I suspect that Clausen intends FIRST AVENUE to be the first in a series featuring Wright and the three women in his life: fellow cop Katherine, married girlfriend and next door neighbor Georgia, and Alaskan expat Maria - especially Maria. If that's the case, I'll likely buy the next in the series, but do hope that Lowen picks up the pace a bit.

Lowen Clausen's "First Avenue" is finally finished. It has been a difficult book to put down, for I could have stayed up all weekend reading it.

It was a very enjoyable first novel.

Though I had lived in Seattle (Rainer Valley) for some years twenty years ago, I now live and work in Olympia. However, I occasionally drive to downtown Seattle, to visit SAM (Seattle Art Museum), or check out the many used book shops along First Avenue from Jackson to the Market, and recognize some of the semi-disguised businesses in the story; the characters are quite believable, and the "local color" agrees with my observations.

The shop locations, such as Silve's diner on the lower level of Pike Place Market, and the "Re(a)d and Green" leftist bookstore (across the cobbled street from the Market newsstand) feel familiar, as does "The Lusty Lady" peep show, with its naughty billboards (and ATM inside), across the street from SAM.

While I always thought the doughnut shop was on Second Avenue, I only knew about it from its unsavory reputation as a hangout for hookers of all ages and both genders.

The level of detail in your first novel reminds me of another author who has researched her specialty quite well: Laura Joh Rowland's "history mystery" series, set in 17th-century Japan, with its protagonist sosakan-sama Sano Ichiro, is an interesting look at the shogunate, and the seamier side of Japanese imperial court life, from a detective's point of view.

Your second novel (Second Watch) is recently published, and the protagonist is Katherine Murphy, not Sam. Interesting, and unexpected (a sexist expectation on my part?). I had looked forward to Henry, with Sam's tennis shoes as a redemptive gift, becoming his "sidekick."

I look forward to reading Second Watch.