Wall of Brass - Softcover

Daley, Robert

3.41

116 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446365661 ISBN 13: 9780446365666

Publisher: Vision, 1995

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When the police commissioner of the city of New York is shot to death while jogging, the mayor gives Chief of Detectives Bert Farber ten days to solve the crime, but top players immediately begin to block the investigation. Reprint.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Which murder would New York City chief of detectives Bert P. Farber least like to be investigating? The police commissioner's, of course. Especially when the commissioner was the old partner who leapfrogged him into his present job over the senior competition- -now his competitors for the commissioner's job, who would like nothing better than to hamstring his investigation. Not that there was any love lost between Bert and the late Harry Chapman, who told his partner the first night on patrol about his timetable for advancement: two years as patrolman while finishing law school, three years in the DA's office, then Congress, the commissioner's job, then senator or governor, then the big one. He'd still be well within his timetable if he hadn't been shot in the heart one snowy morning on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But Bert, once he gets over a serious case of the flashbacks (he and Harry had romanced the same two women, marrying each other's dates), wonders why Harry was jogging miles from his Greenwich Village home. Despite interference from his rivals for Harry's job, he soon finds a love nest unlocked by the key he snitched from Harry's corpse. But which of Harry's secret women killed him--the flight attendant, the Mafia princess, or the inevitable police wife? Bert has swiped both the key and the fatal bullet without logging them in, broken into Harry's office to steal his little black book, seized a stained suit of clothes without a warrant, and hidden in a ladies' room to interrogate a suspect while her lawyer waited back in his office. Given these breaches of procedure, what kind of case will the DA be able to make against the perp, and what will Bert's reputation, to say nothing of his chances for promotion, look like when the dust has settled? Not up to the level of Tainted Evidence (1993)--those long flashbacks, fueled by nothing more than a heap of dramatic irony, make the first half of the novel slow going. But once it builds up steam, a powerful portrait of a bulldog cop who doesn't even know himself why he won't let go. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

The murder of a top cop and the political infighting that ensues form the focus of Daley's first-rate new thriller. When New York City Police Commissioner Harry Chapman is shot while jogging on Manhattan's Upper West Side, his former patrol-car partner, Bert Farber, now chief of detectives, is assigned to find the killer. Farber is also one of three top contenders to replace Chapman as commissioner, and his two chief rivals are doing their best to roadblock him in his search for the killer. Complicating the situation are Farber's torrid romance with Chapman's wife, Mary Alice, growing doubts about the dead man's true character and personality-and a deadline: by law, the mayor has only 10 days to name Chapman's replacement. Balancing Farber's investigation with chapters detailing his and Chapman's past relationship and their early competition for Mary Alice's affections, Daley constructs his mystery as an absorbing character study, concentrating mainly on Farber but soon revealing that Chapman was less than the paragon he appeared. Tight and tautly told, this novel is much more satisfying than Daley's last, Tainted Evidence, because it's built around a character that readers will care about and that Daley seems to care about as well. As in his best work, moreover, the author displays his bone-deep knowledge of New York cops and criminals (manifest most enjoyably here in a vividly portrayed mob boss chipped off the block of John Gotti)-a knowledge surely gained in part when, in the early '70s, Daley served as the city's deputy police commissioner. Readers' Digest Condensed Books.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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