From Amazon.com
Penzler Pick, April 2000: The texture of America runs through the novels of the pseudonymous K.C. Constantine, whose original tales of police chief Mario Balzic and the faded industrial reality of his fictional hometown, Rocksburg, Pa., have given way to cases featuring a younger cop, "Rugs" Carlucci, in the same setting. Both men are supremely decent public citizens performing an almost thankless job, tireless soldiers in not just a perpetual battle against law-breakers but also ongoing skirmishes of class warfare against which their skills unfortunately count for less.
As Constantine fans (and I am one of long standing) already know, the mystery plot is never the reason to come to this series. While the plots are fine, and usually compelling, it is because of the often achingly alive characterizations, the glimpses into soul and spirit, that one reads this writer. His blue-collar milieu offers a variant on the "down these mean streets" exhortation that Raymond Chandler could never have envisioned. While Chandler meant the detective in the crime story should be a figure not involved in the artificial precincts of ersatz English manor houses and rural vicarages, he certainly never was imagining a hero like Ruggiero Carlucci, struggling to solve a murder while locked in daily conflict with the increasingly demented mother he lives with. Rugs--neither martyr nor saint, but exhibiting aspects of both--is simply a man who's trying to do not just his job but also his duty as a son. In Grievance, Mrs. Ruggiero is now herself engaging in mayhem, with Rugs twice in need of hospital attention as a result of her uncontrollable violent impulses.
There is, as well, an actual murder case demanding Rugs's official attention: the magnate who had allowed his steel plant to be closed, shattering hundreds of local lives, has been found shot to death. There are so many suspects who would have been happy to see him dead that Rugs isn't able to eliminate anyone. It's all in a day's work, even if it means brushing up against the kind of personal pain with which the suffering Rugs is all too familiar. Grievance is pure Constantine, and that's saying plenty of praise in just two words as he somehow remains below the radar of even sophisticated mystery readers as the best unknown crime writer in America. --Otto Penzler
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Publishers Weekly
Nobody writes about rust-belt angst better than Constantine, whose stories (like 1999's Blood Mud) about the cops and other citizens of Rocksburg, Pa., resonate with generations of failed working-class hopes. Constantine's dialogue has been justly praised for reproducing the frustration of the inarticulate. But now that legendary police chief Mario Balzic has retired and detective Ruggerio "Rugs" Carlucci has moved center stage, there seems to be much more personal angst and much less actual crime or mystery. More than half of this new novel has to do with Carlucci's heartbreaking efforts to look after his mother, whose mental decline has taken a dangerously violent turn. Then there's the detective's uncertain relationship with psychiatric social worker Franny Perfetti, as well as his dealings with an ambitious, truculent state trooper, Claude Milliron. Using plenty of trademark dialogue to portray Perfetti and Milliron, the author doesn't devote much space to the basic plot: the murders of 65-year-old steel magnate J.D. Lyons, who helped the town's decline by moving his company to South America, and of local union official Frankie Krull, who didn't protect his workers. The publisher's publicity release quotes a review of Blood Mud that says that Constantine "virtually leaves crime fiction behind"; hopefully, the jacket of this finely crafted novel will repeat the warning. Mystery Guild featured alternate. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
