Neptune Avenue: A Jack Leightner Crime Novel (Jack Leightner Crime Novels) [Hardcover]

Gabriel Cohen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Jack Leightner Crime Novels | Publication Date: April 28, 2009

“If we took it all personally,” Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner tells his rookie NYPD partner, “there’s no way we could do the job.”

 

Very soon, though, that notion gets shot to hell, as the deeply principled cop hears about the murder of an old Russian friend on Neptune Avenue---and then is disturbed to find himself increasingly drawn to the man’s stunning widow, Eugenia. She informs Jack of her husband’s troubles with Semyon Balakutis, a local nightclub operator and extortionist. Meanwhile, a mysterious stranger in central Brooklyn is killing young women and posing them as suicides.

 

From the Russian emigré community of Brighton Beach to the racially charged neighborhood of Crown Heights, from the crimes of World War II to the harshness of his own father, Jack’s latest cases plunge him deep into the roots of why men act in anger---and into the eternal mystery of love.

 

Gabriel Cohen stuns in this riveting third addition to the Brooklyn-set series.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Jack Leightner juggles two Brooklyn cases in Cohen's so-so third novel to feature the NYPD detective (after 2007's The Graving Dock): the staged suicides of two women and the murder of Russian Daniel Lelo, with whom Leightner shared a hospital room years earlier after both men were shot. Leightner, whose previous relationships include an ex-wife and a girlfriend who revealed she was seeing someone else just as he was about to propose marriage, finds himself falling for Lelo's attractive widow, Zhenya. His refusal to consider Zhenya a serious suspect damages the book's credibility, as do a number of other mistakes that a veteran like Leightner shouldn't make. Some awkward prose (e.g., The girl behind the counter was a skinny little thing dotted—like a doughnut—with bright pink acne) and a contrived ending don't help. Reggie Nadleson does a better job of covering much the same geographic and emotional territory in his Artie Cohen novels (Fresh Kills, etc.). (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Contemporary Brooklyn is one of the wellsprings of crime fiction. With many dozens of ethnic enclaves sitting cheek by jowl, it is a roiling place that challenges even the skills of veteran NYPD Homicide Detective Jack Leightner. In this third Leightner novel (following The Graving Dock, 2007, and Red Hook, 2001), Jack finds himself plumbing the mysteries of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn’s Russian enclave. He’s after the murderer of a friend, a Russian immigrant he shared a hospital room with while recovering from a bullet wound; but what lonely Leightner finds first is love, or at least infatuation, with Zhenya, the victim’s wife. Principled and soulful, Leightner chastises himself for his feelings while his investigation takes him from Crown Heights to Coney Island. But plot takes a backseat here to character—Jack’s and Brooklyn’s—as Cohen treats crime fans to quirky details of Jack’s world and a knowing glimpse of an amazing place blessed and afflicted by a surfeit of “tribes” that sometimes go to war and are always suspicious of outsiders. Cohen’s novels belong, with those of Norman Green, at the top of every Brooklyn crime-fiction list. --Thomas Gaughan

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Minotaur Books; First Edition edition (April 28, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312380615
• ISBN-13: 978-0312380618
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,626,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A talented young author, June 21, 2009

By 

J Grayshaw "SSPJ1962" (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Neptune Avenue: A Jack Leightner Crime Novel (Jack Leightner Crime Novels) (Hardcover)

Neptune Avenue is the third in a series of crime novels by Gabriel Cohen featuring Jack Leightner, a Homicide Detective, in South Brooklyn. But from the very beginning of the series the stories are more than murders and "who done it". The reader is given a complex psychological description of a man with a past that affects his present life- from his alcoholic father, to the death of his brother at an early age, to a failed marriage, and trouble in all his personal relationships. Neptune Avenue continues the series with murders to be solved and relationships to be examined as Jack Leightner seeks to find the murderer of two young women who were found hanged, and the murderer of a man with whom he once shared a hospital room when he was shot years before (in Red Hook, his first novel with Detective Leightner). In the process Leightner falls in love with the man's widow.

Neptune Avenue is clearly a masculine book, but with a sensitivity to human relationships that women will find alluring. It is compelling reading to anyone who has lived in Brooklyn and is familiar with the locations he mentions- Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Red Hook. The book is a "page turner". I do not understand why these books have not been picked up by a movie studio as they would make great films. I am looking forward to his next book featuring Jack Leightner.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Taking it Personally, June 5, 2009

By 

Ted Feit (Long Beach, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Neptune Avenue: A Jack Leightner Crime Novel (Jack Leightner Crime Novels) (Hardcover)

Brooklyn may have lost the Dodgers many years ago, but on a more positive note, in recent times it has gained Jack Leightner, homicide detective, in the series based on various sections of that borough. Initially, he appeared in "Red Hook," then in "The Graving Dock." Now, in the third in the series, he solves crimes in two areas: Coney Island/Brighton Beach and Crown Heights.

While recovering from a bullet wound, Jack befriends a Russian émigré sharing his hospital room. The roommate owns a fish import-export business in the Fulton Fish Market and is married to a very attractive woman. When they are released from the hospital, the two men rehabilitate together, walking, sharing steam baths, and getting closer. Subsequently his friend is shot dead, and Jack takes it personally. He becomes entangled romantically with the widow, who points him toward another Russian (Brighton Beach is home to a large segment of that population), and Jack attempts to prove him guilty of the crime.

Meanwhile two women are found hanged in the Crown Heights section, inhabited primarily by Hasidic Jews. Beaver fibers are located on each scene, where the women were determined to be strangled rather than suicide victims. Jack proceeds to follow each case while carrying on his affair with the widow, jeopardizing his career.

Each of the three novels in the series portrays Brooklyn, its sights, sounds and history, with an authentic flavor. And the author's ability to write a clear police procedural places him on a par with the best of the genre. In this latest chapter, we learn more about Leightner, the person, and it makes him more human than superman. All to the good. Recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Who did you get yourself tangled up with?", May 24, 2009

By 

E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Neptune Avenue: A Jack Leightner Crime Novel (Jack Leightner Crime Novels) (Hardcover)

In Gabriel Cohen's "Neptune Avenue," Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner tackles two very different cases. The first is set in Crown Heights, where someone is killing young black women and trying to make their deaths appear to be suicides. The second involves the slaying of a Russian businessman, Daniel Lelo, whom Jack had befriended two years earlier while they were both recovering in the hospital from gunshot wounds. Now Lelo is dead, shot once again, this time in the center of his forehead. Jack has been divorced for more than fifteen years and has a twenty-five year old son, Ben, whom he rarely sees. After he was dumped by the woman he hoped to marry, his social life hits bottom, and he has become something of a recluse. When he interviews Leo's widow, Eugenia (Zhenya), he is deeply attracted to the vulnerable and attractive woman.

Jack shares equal billing with the colorful borough where most of the action takes place. "Ideally, a cop here should be a walking ethnic encyclopedia and a speaker of several dozen languages." Cohen describes Brooklyn in vivid detail, taking us from Crown Heights, with its large population of African-Americans, West Indians, and Chasidic Jews to Brighton Beach, known as Little Odessa because the majority of its residents emigrated from the former Soviet Union. One particularly memorable character is Semyon Balakutis, a "tough guy" who "had the sour cockiness of a playground bully." He and Daniel had words shortly before Lelo died, and Jack suspects that this thug may have had a hand in Lelo's murder. The author pays visits to the Fulton Fish Market in Manhattan, where Daniel Lelo worked, as well as Coney Island, where "seagulls cawed overhead like shrill party noisemakers, the rides in the two amusement parks clanged and dinged, [and] rap music thumped out from a nearby bumper car emporium."

Cohen has a spare and straightforward writing style, and the novel moves along at a fast clip. "Neptune Avenue" is a police procedural that works best as a character study of the lonely, greedy, and desperate people who resort to violence to achieve their goals. Jack is an engaging and sympathetic protagonist. Although he is smart and tenacious, when his emotions get in the way of his professional duties, he makes some questionable choices. At one point, Jack wonders plaintively "why it was so hard for people to really see each other, and why they inflicted so much absolutely unnecessary pain." Although you don't necessarily have to know and love Brooklyn to enjoy "Neptune Avenue," those who were born and/or brought up in this unique borough won't want to miss this one.