Tanenbaum's Fury: Someone Please Get the Coincidence Fairy a Naprosyn for Her Wand Wrist!
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
|
Author: Robert K. Tanenbaum
Title: Fury Genre: mystery Four young African-American men who were convicted of a wilding-gone-worse rape and attempted murder have just been sprung from stir on the basis of another inmate’s confession. A visiting professor of Russian poetry at a prestigious New York university has been charged with raping one of his graduate students. A covert Al Qaeda cell is plotting its next attack on New York, hoodwinking the local Black Muslim community into helping out their “downtrodden Arab brothers.” Two Columbia University basketball players, originally convicted of date-rape at a party, are out of jail while the Manhattan DA’s office looks into the possibility that the victim’s testimony was pure perjury. An incompetent and unscrupulous District Attorney colludes with a crooked judge to make certain that a power broker looks on her political career with favor. What do all of these tales have in common? Easy: they’re all subplots of Fury, the latest from the keyboard of Robert K. Tanenbaum. Now that you know that, you know that the fingerprints of Butch Karp (heir apparent to the position of the Manhattan District Attorney) and his wife, Marlene Ciampi (lawyer turned vigilante turned mother turned dog trainer turned mother of twins turned painter…) and their three offspring will be all over the neat little bows that tie up all these cases. Boy, the Coincidence Fairy worked her little wand to the bone for Tanenbaum this time out! We begin with the release from jail of the Coney Island Four, the young men imprisoned for the brutal gang rape of a young wife and mother ten years ago after a night of wilding. Their lawyer – an obese and sweat-soaked power broker within the African-American community – puts the metaphorical screws to the political hopes of the Brooklyn DA, who folds like a cheap suitcase. This clears the way for Hugh Louis to sue the City of New York for a few hundred million dollars. In a secret move, the not-yet-elected Manhattan DA, Butch Karp, is asked to defend the city. Meanwhile, a key witness – one who could cast grave doubt on the confession of a “born-again” inmate that cleared the four – has gone missing in Brighton Beach among the Russian immigrant community. Should be easy to find though – he’s missing an arm… While out painting one cold December day, Karp’s wife Marlene encounters a tear-streaked woman in the Russian tea room where she stops to warm her aging bones. Seems Marlene’s husband’s office is prosecuting the poor woman’s husband for raping one of his students (a gorgeous 36DD blonde…). Marlene, of course, decides to help the poor woman. As they finish their tea, a wild-eyed one-armed man rushes into the restaurant… The Karp-Ciampi sons (Giancarlo and Isaac) want to shoot hoops with the big boys, one of whom has sort of befriended the thirteen-year-old twins. Their new friend’s Khalif, one of those erstwhile scholarship B-ball players at Columbia only recently sprung from jail. His buddy Rashaad, though, prefers hanging with a tougher crowd at the local mosque. The crowd’s led by Hassam, from “somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula” (he’s really an Al-sistani – which name alone ought to be enough to identify him as a real baddie), who has a big plan to “take it to the white and Jew oppressors”… The Karp-Ciampi daughter Lucy is having horrible dreams about a religious wacko. Her friend John Jojola, chief of police at the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, is having similar dreams. The two, along with Lucy’s cowboy boyfriend Ned, return to New York to seek the reason behind the dreams… Now since it’s Tanenbaum writing, you’ve probably already figured out that that there will be a deadly showdown in which Marlene kills people, her giant Neapolitan Mastiff kills people, at least one member of the Karp-Ciampi clan will be kidnapped and held in deadly peril, and every single piece of the puzzle will be slid together by a wave or two of the Coincidence Fairy’s magic wand. And you’d be right. I don’t know why I torture myself by reading Tanenbaum novels. The over-reliance on coincidence that lets him tie all of his multiple plot threads (I left out three or four to save space) frankly defies reason. Let me give you a hint, Robert: there are more than eight million people in New York City. How likely is it that Marlene Ciampi would wander into the right tea room to find the distraught wife just as the one-armed man wanders in the door? How likely is it that those two disaffected ex-Columbia basketball players are out shooting hoops on the court by the Karp-Ciampi house? In late December? And would even look at playing with a pair of thirteen-year-olds? How likely is it that a Vietnam war veteran would meet - much less recognize! - his old Viet Cong archenemy in a tunnel under New York City thirty-plus years later? Oh, yeah, the Coincidence Fairy ended up with a case of carpal-tunnel syndrome from this plot. Actually, in the past I read a couple of Tanenbaum novels because his characters are pretty interesting – take, for instance, daughter Lucy: she speaks more than sixty languages. Or how ‘bout dad Butch, a would-be pro basketball player whose knee blowout forced him into law? The supporting cast of characters is usually pretty strong – with the caveat that Tanenbaum truly likes to saddle his characters with hideous names: try Ray Guma, Ariadne Stupenagel, and Karp’s latest secretary, Mrs. Milquetoast. However, the outlandish nature of his kitchen-sink plots – in this book alone he folds in wilding, prosecutorial malfeasance, corruption, Islamic terrorists, date rape, blackmail… you name it, it’s in there. A jacket blurb attributed to Cyril H. Wecht, MD, JD (whoever he may be) says, “[his] ability to weave several seemingly unrelated plots together is truly masterful.” Sorry, Cyril – those aren’t woven together; they’re slapped together like something that Rube Goldberg might design while on an acid trip. I’m a trivia buff – or more accurately, a fact buff. I get a lot of information from reading fiction. Writers like Jeffery Deaver, John Irving, and others do plenty of research to build background for their stories. I would, however, be loath to trot out any “fact” I thought I harvested from reading Tanenbaum’s work. Here’s a sampling of mistakes that could be chalked up to failure to research:
I’m also not convinced that Taos Pueblo (population ~1250) has – or needs – a chief of police (Tanenbaum wants to emulate Tony Hillerman?), or that black-footed ferrets are particularly common in northern New Mexico. Tanenbaum starts his tale with a 28-year-old woman who named her daughter Rhiannon for the song on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, from 1977 – ‘cept the baby was supposed to have been born in 1995 (reunion tour, perhaps?). And I’m not certain – did the Soviets still have troops in Afghanistan in 1990? Tanenbaum thinks so… Bottom Line: Full of fluff, poorly written and researched, Fury wastes a couple of potentially interesting characters on multiple visits from the Coincidence Fairy and suffers immensely from a excess of plots. Had Tanenbaum chosen one – or perhaps two – and expanded on them, the book would have been better. It’s the kitchen-sink syndrome that, well, sinks this one. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
|