Red Hook
Penzler Pick,October  2001:Here's the evocative first paragraph of this accomplished debut  novel, seeped in the atmosphere of the once vibrant but now desolate Brooklyn  neighborhood of Red Hook:The Gowanus Canal was a bilious green. Long ago, Brooklyn kids had jumped in off  its narrow banks to shout and splash around, but more than a century's worth of  raw sewage and pollution from the adjoining factories had rendered the water  unfit for every living thing except some algae and a tiny perverse species  called killifish. Its opaque depths kept many secrets, but by a stroke of luck  this corpse was not one of them.Detective Jack Leightner of Brooklyn's South Homicide Task Force is the honcho  brought in to give a hand to the local precinct. It is not only his years of  experience scooping out murder scenes that will be called into play. This is the  neighborhood where he grew up, the son of a dockworker, and it's the place  that's left a hole in his heart: "Going back to Red Hook was love shot through  with pain...." Even Raymond Chandler could not have envisioned streets this  mean. As a former patrol partner of Jack's once described Red Hook, it was  somewhere "you didn't have to look hard to find a place to piss out in the  open."The dead man wasn't mob-connected or even a petty criminal; he was a hard- working family man with a respectable job, running the service elevator in a  fancy Manhattan Eastside building. As Jack Leightner attempts to discover what  brought poor Tomas Berrios to his date with a lethally wielded knife, he is  forced to confront his own ghosts and to deal with his own agonizing memories of  a long-ago corpse with a similar wound.It's a familiar setup--the veteran cop with a diminished ability to understand  his own emotions or to express them--but Cohen breathes fresh life into it.  Atmospheric and shot through with moments of real human truth,Red Hookis a first mystery that feels like it's been around forever--and I mean that in  the best sense.--Otto Penzler