Fury (Butch Karp Series #17) » (~)

Robert K. Tanenbaum is one of the country's most successful trial lawyers — he has never lost a felony case. He has been homicide bureau chief for the New York District Attorney's Office and deputy chief counsel to the congressional committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Most recently, he has taught Advanced Criminal Procedure atthe University of California at Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. His previous works include the novels Escape, Malice, Fury, Hoax, Resolved, Enemy Within, and Absolute Rage and two true-crime books, The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer and Badge of the Assassin.

In Brooklyn, a female jogger is brutally raped; the assailants are convicted and later exonerated by the Kings County DA. Now the guilty are filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city of New York, the police, and the two Brooklyn Assistant DAs who tried the case. Caught in the glare of the media-frenzy, Butch Karp may be blinded to the lethal maneuverings of a terrorist cell plotting to bring the city to its knees by striking Times Square on New Year's Eve. But the destruction begins far below ground, in the subway system — where Karp's family may become their first victims....

Publishers Weekly

At the center of Tanenbaum's scattershot, complicated 17th entry in his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series (Hoax, etc.) is a decade-old rape perpetrated by four young men beneath the Coney Island Pier. The so-called Coney Island Four were eventually caught and sent to prison, but an oily, race-baiting lawyer, Hugh Louis, has managed to free them and is now filing a $250 million lawsuit against the city of New York. Karp, Manhattan's district attorney, smells corrupt cooperation between Brooklyn's political establishment and the lawyer, and at the request of the mayor, he steps in to defend the city. Though Tanenbaum effectively brings readers inside the world of crime, politics and the law, he bloats the thriller with distracting subplots. In a boilerplate Tanenbaum twist, a terrorist cell led by a brutal Iraqi takes over an abandoned subway tunnel and takes a member of Karp's family hostage as part of its plan to blow up Times Square on New Year's Eve. Meanwhile, Karp's wife, Ciampi, works to exonerate a college professor accused of rape at the same time she pitches in on the Coney Island Four case. It's too bad Tanenbaum has overstuffed his latest thriller: somewhere beneath the layers of fat there's a svelte, snappy story. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.