“Sleepless City,” by Reed Farrel Coleman (Blackstone)
Nick Ryan, the protagonist in a new series by veteran crime novelist Reed Farrel Coleman, begins his fictional life with a lot of baggage.
Nick’s fellow New York City cops don’t trust him because his father once testified against a cabal of corrupt officers. Nick’s brother, a fellow cop, is on an alcohol-fueled path of self-destruction. And an old girlfriend Nick had never gotten over suddenly pops up in his life again, married now but raising a toddler that looks a lot like Nick.
As if that weren’t enough, Nick’s mentor in the department is dead by his own hand, shooting himself after getting caught planting evidence on a pedophile who was about escape justice. Like his late mentor, Nick is willing to taking the law into his own hands when thinks the situation requires it. We learn this right off when he sets out to kill the pedophile.
Meanwhile, a crooked financier has looted the police union pension fund, and a string of police shootings in Black neighborhoods has provoked so much anger that the “Sleepless City” of the book’s title is on the precipice of racial violence. An explosion appears all but inevitable when a rookie cop badly misreads a situation and guns down two Black citizens in a city housing project.
That’s when a mysterious figure offers Nick unlimited resources and high-level protection in return for working as a fixer for the city’s power elite. Nick, something of a cross between Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Showtime TV’s Ray Donovan and Denzel Washington’s “The Equalizer” movie character, reluctantly agrees, wondering all the while what he’ll do when his shadowy new bosses order him to do something that violates his unconventional code of ethics.
“For the power elite,” Nick says, “it always comes down to money. Blood was just an added expense.”
Nick’s first two assignments: Whitewash the housing project shooting before word of what happened leaks out. Then track down the financier and force him, by any means necessary, to return the stolen pension money.
From this starting point, the author fashions a fast-paced, tension-laden plot featuring a vicious right-wing propagandist, an on-the-lamb terrorist from the Irish Troubles, a corrupt prison official, the fatal bombing of a bar where police hang out, and a generous helping of violence with Nick alternately dishing it out and victimized by it.
The result is a vivid, beautifully written portrait of an American city and a new hero willing and able to administer his own brand of justice regardless of personal cost. Coleman, a four-time Edgar Award finalist and winner of Shamus, Barry, Anthony and Macavity awards, has an impressive, 21-book oeuvre, but “Sleepless City” may well be his finest work.
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Bruce DeSilva, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award, is the author of the Mulligan crime novels including “The Dread Line.”
