Fury [Mass Market Paperback]

Robert Tanenbaum's new novel, "Fury," is the seventeenth in his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series. Butch Karp is now the interim Manhattan DA in a city filled with racial and political tension. In spite of the pressures of his job, Butch is not complaining. Much to his relief, his wife of twenty-five years is no longer involved in her usual wild and dangerous escapades. In fact, Marlene is trying to keep a low profile, and she seems content to spend more time at home with her family. For a change, everything seems to be going smoothly for the Karps. Little do they know that trouble is brewing on several fronts.

First, a group of black men, who have been nicknamed "the Coney Island Four," are suing the city. They claim that they were railroaded into confessing to the brutal rape and beating of a female jogger named Liz Tyler. Although the men spent time in prison, they are now free and have the support of an opportunistic lawyer named Hugh Louis who loves to play the race card. Michael Denton, the Mayor-elect of New York, and Richard Torrisi, the attorney for the Police Benevolent Association, ask Butch Karp to step in and represent the city as special counsel. Denton and Torrisi want a man of known integrity at the helm, and Butch reluctantly agrees to help.

"Fury" also deals with Middle Eastern terrorists who are planning a major strike against Manhattan on New Year's Eve. There is also the high-profile case of Sarah Ryder, who claims that her Russian professor, Alexis Michalik, raped her after drugging her drink. Michalik, who is happily married and awaiting the birth of his first child, vehemently denies Sarah's charges. As usual, Karp and his family get involved in all of these story lines and Butch once again wages war against corrupt cops, lawyers, and judges.

Tanenbaum throws in a host of both new and familiar characters, including the aforementioned terrorists, Russian gangsters, "mole people" who live under the streets of New York, John Jojola, a spiritual police chief from New Mexico, and a Vietnamese man named Tran, all of whom play key roles in the novel. Ace reporter and snoop, saucy Ariadne Stupenagel, is still nosing into Karp's business, and Butch's old cronies, Ray Guma and V. T. Newbury, are on hand to lend Butch some much needed assistance.

Not only has Tanenbaum attempted to do too much this time around, but he also goes over the same ground that he has covered many times before. Although there is a bit of romance and cutesy humor to lighten things up a bit, "Fury" is dizzying, much too complicated, repetitious, and extremely implausible. The overburdened narrative eventually sinks under its own enormous weight. Butch, Marlene, and their children again play the roles of superheroes, as they have so many times in the past.

There is no question that Tanenbaum knows New York, and he always deals with timely themes in a lively manner. He captures the earthy dialogue of the city's streetwise denizens, and he is intimately acquainted with the ins and outs of the criminal justice system. His courtroom scenes are as entertaining as ever. However, at almost five hundred pages, "Fury" is a bloated tome featuring cartoonish characters involved in far-fetched situations. Let's hope that book number eighteen, which Tanenbaum sets up with a cliffhanger ending, will be more streamlined and believable than this one.

Like Hoax, a dreadful book. The characters are flat, vapid, and unrecognizable to anyone who has read the earlier books. The writing is simply appalling. The organized campaign would seem to be that of Mr. Tannenbaum, not the much-missed Mr. Gruber.

I just finished "Fury" by Robert Tanenbaum, and I would really like to have the 6 hours or so of my life back. The only reason I slogged through this mess is that I have read and enjoyed all the other Karp/Ciampi outings.

The characters in this book are reduced to charicatures The bad guys are Snidely Whiplashes in that they leer, sneer, sweat like pigs and have no redeeming characteristics to humanize them at all. When they get their comeuppances, which one can forsee the instant they are introduced, there is no satisfaction for the reader because the end is so obvious.

Butch is tired, Marlene got boring, Lucy is barely there and what's up with the cowboy and the mystic??? Morlochs and mole people, oy, give me a break!

The plots, there are 3 or 4 or - who can keep count? - are totally without subtlety and verge on the preposterous.

To sum up: too much, too little, too bad. Are we sure Robert Tanenbaum really wrote this book?

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