Sweet Deal: A Novel [Hardcover]

John Westermann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1992

A good-looking, athletic police officer, tired of his role as a shill for the department, asks to be taken off soft duty and is teamed up with a steamy young policewoman hunting an ugly killer. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Grisly murders, corruption, sex, love, madness and heroism all become strangely humdrum in this lackluster police thriller. After years of cushy public relations duty, officer Jack Mills wants to earn some respect as a homicide detective. A handsome, 36-year-old divorced ex-lacrosse star who is both promiscuous and selfish, Mills strives to reform himself as he investigates the murders of two corrupt fellow cops in Nassau County, Long Island. Mills runs the investigation with Claire Williamson, a tough, sexy Suffolk County detective from a family of cops. Together they search out the connections between the victims, Artie Backman and Richard "Dicktop" Mazzarella, two widely despised police captains. Westerman ( Exit Wounds ) initially succeeds in making his protagonist credible, but his evolution is less convincing: Mills breaks his handsome nose, falls in love with Claire and ends up a decorated hero. The novel's other cops are just so many catchy nicknames, difficult to differentiate among from one chapter to the next. Ultimately the caper itself is unsatisfying, its resolution leaving many questions but little desire to dig for the answers.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Suburban Long Island, scene of Westermann's Exit Wounds (1990), is the menacing background in the search for a cop killer. Westermann, one of the few crime writers to realize that America is now the suburbs and that criminals live in ranch houses too, uses the sprawl outside New York to great effect as Detective Jack Mills seeks to become a real cop after years in the police department's p.r. division. Mills, a handsome former athlete now in his 30s, skated through his youth, supported by men and women who would do anything for a jock. Now divorced and living alone after the departure of his latest popsy, the homicide detective stands his first real police duty when he's charged with finding out who murdered Arthur Backman, a policeman disliked by everyone he knew, including his wife and yuppie son. Teamed with sexy Claire Williamson, a more experienced and competent detective, Mills begins to turn up evidence of Backman's corruption and his sordid liaison with a pathetic cop groupie, and rather quickly Mills finds that he is poking into the affairs of the local syndicate, the local Republican machine, and his own superiors at the police station. He may be in over his head. Even more awkward, he has become more than a little smitten with Detective Williamson, a very difficult woman to impress. Things get uglier as another rotten policeman dies and a nice little old Irish lady is menaced by a villain on a ten-speed. Good stuff. Westermann paints people rather than types and puts them into a palpable world of strip malls, frontage roads, and postwar subdivisions. Gangsters in the townships are as creepy as their brothers in the boroughs. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 231 pages
• Publisher: Soho Pr Inc; 1 edition (February 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0939149567
• ISBN-13: 978-0939149568
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,480,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Long Island Wambough, June 8, 2005

By 

D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Deal (Paperback)

Someone is brutally bumping off corrupt Long Island cops. I found this a page-turner with good dialog and strong plotting. Although the characters are believable they are mostly stereotyped. Lucy Lallos the tricycle-riding alcoholic was the best, and Champ the dog was good. The hero Detective Jack Mills is handsome, athletic and incorruptible. His marriage is on the rocks because of his dedication to his job. There's a black officer with a chip on his shoulder about being black, and an attractive female officer with a chip on her shoulder about being attractive and female, a hooker with a heart of gold, a rich obnoxious lawyer and sinister Mafiosi. It is all well done and the writer knows his craft and how to divert us with red herrings and how to keep us on the edge of our seats with cliffhanger chapter endings and clever switches of POV but we've been here before. The climactic hostage scene was high in tension but low in plausibility.
The most original touch is the dense Long Island atmosphere. If you live there this might be appealing, but there was nothing that made me want to jump onto the LIRR and take a look at the place.