Customer Reviews

Lieberman's Day

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

 

 

I've just discovered Kaminsky and I must say Leiberman and Hanrahan just walked right off the pages. All of Kaminsky's characters are truly "characters". No vapid plots or dialogue either. Just the right mix of suspense, humor, cop-speak and life at the dinner table. Highly memorable...Leiberman's the Jewish grandfather I never had and never knew I wanted.

From Publishers Weekly:

Kaminsky may be best known for his Toby Peters series, most recently The Melting Clock , set in 1940's L.A., but this third outing for Chicago homicide detective Abe Lieberman (after Lieb erman's Choice ) firmly establishes the characters and setting of this present-day series as well. Lieberman's nephew, David, and David's pregnant wife are shot in a late night mugging.

David dies; his wife and unborn child survive, barely. Lieberman gets the case and in the following 24 hours deals with the grief of his brother and sister-in-law, the aftereffects of the collapse of his daughter's marriage, the desperate deal he cuts with a violent drug-dealer called El Perro to catch the killers and the busting of two con artists. Lieberman's partner, Bill Hanrahan, copes with his own alcoholism, ambivalent feelings for his runaway wife, his Chinese-American lover and murderous Frankie Kraylaw, whose abused wife and son he has been sheltering.

Lieberman uncovers a final nasty secret about the murder as he and Hanrahan are involved in separate violent conclusions. Kaminsky masterfully limns his colorful characters, none more finely than 62-year-old Abe: smart, weary and loving, with a sorrowful, wise appreciation for life's absurdities and gifts.

This book is occurs over a single 24 hour period of a day in cold wintry Chicago (no Jack Bauer does not make an appearance, but then neither does his daughter). It begins with a robbery gone wrong and the shooting of Abe's pregnant niece and the death of his brother Moishe's son David. At the same time, Frankie, the crazed Jesus freak, who Father Murphy and the Rabbi put on a bus out of town, is back and looking for blood.

We spend the day with Abe and Hanrahan, looking over their shoulders as they do their best to find the perps. APBs are sent out (which tracks down one of the killers in a hospital in LaGrange) and Lieberman calls in a favor from his favorite mexican/chicano criminal "El Piero". We also follow Frankie as he looks for his wife and daughter who happen to be staying with Father Murphy.

Blah, blah, blah, bang bang bang, yeeeeeee splat, bang bang bang bang bang uh bang. One perp is found in the hospital, another jumps off a building and Frankie is shot by Hanrahan five or six times. All things end well, uh sort of, but I won't give away the twists and turns. A great addition to the series.

The audio cassettes for this were horribly narrated.

The reader, apparently, was able to change up his voice for female and ethnic voices, slightly. This is not my complaint.

The reader failed, horribly, to indicate punctuation present in the book.

The reader droned on, making paragraph 2 sound identical to paragraph 3. In several instances, the author changed the setting and time period in between paragraphs. Fair enough. But the way this was narrated, it just jumbled into one big masssssss of fiction, and I had no idea, from one moment to the next, where or whom the book was taking me to. Augggghhhh.

The book, in its paper form, might be OK. It claims to cover "the 24 hour period after a brutal robbery and murder". But, mysteriously, we are privy to the wake, funeral, hospitalization, release-from-hospital, and many other things of the crime victims. WTF?! How about a bit of truth in writing book jackets?

Very sorry, but due to the awful narration job, I need to give a negative review to the cassette production of this book.