Hardboiled Brooklyn
In a collection as uneven as the borough's mean-but-gentrifying streets, 17 crime writers present freshly commissioned stories about Brooklyn denizens ranging from white children at play in the idealized Dodgers era to recent Chinese immigrants sweating over cards in basement gambling dens. If the picture appears fragmented, perhaps that's because Brooklyn is "a broad flat plain covered with tribes," as Gabriel Cohen puts it in his piquant tale of two lonely cops stalking crooked repairmen. Although editor Coleman might have helped his book by salting a few classic tales among the new works, there plenty of other highlights. These include Joseph Wallace's O. Henry twist on standing up to a childhood bully, Peter Blauner's sharp snapshot of a dad who loses his son on the F train to Coney Island, and, especially, Jim Fusilli's pitch-perfect take on rival teen-idol wannabes who give new meaning to the wordhitat the dawn of the pop and civil-rights eras.Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved