The Crime Beat (Fuller)
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
This popped up as a free ebook in a mailing list where most of the free ones look like some sort of paranormal or magic teen/young adult romance. Nothing wrong with that, but I've read a few of those and I have so many other things to read before I download another. Crime Beat at least sounded like it'd be different.
It was. First impressions, these were guesses based on the title and the blurb. The words "Episode 1" make it sound like it's a pilot for a TV show, and at times reads like that. In fact, I could see this as an episode of a network TV show (not basic cable or streaming). Second, the part that says "New York", as if later books will take place in other cities. Considering that one of the two parties involved -- note that the top of the page in the ebook says "A Cole-Warren Mystery" -- is a NYPD cop who's been sidelined, with pay, because of an investigation into striking a suspect. (He slammed the suspect's face into the metal grate that separates the front of the cop car from the back.) Obviously, if the action is going to move to other cities, he's not going to be reinstated any time soon, if at all.
At 192 pages, it was a short read, and it was also a quick read. This was literally 2 or 2 1/2 days for me, while I was also reading other stuff on the side. It's not that it was riveting and I couldn't put it down, but I sped through it and it kept my attention until I dropped the iPad when I was falling asleep.
The story is straight-forward for a police procedural or an investigative reporter, and this has both of those, except that the cop has to sneak around because he can't be connected to anything without possibly tainting the case. Not a lot of twists and turns. Just enough info is given about the characters to make them interesting, and that info is used later on in other ways.
The story opens with an old guy, old enough that Roger Marris autographed a baseball bat for him in 1961, while the story takes place in 2018, is a professional hit man. He kills a billionaire in front of the Met in NYC. Jane Cole, reporter for the New York Sun investigates. Cops don't like her because she's the reporter who ran the story about the brutal cop. Said cop meets Cole at the crime scene. They wind up involved in this together to find the guy that did it. Again, straightforward after that, but it's par of a bigger story.
This next paragraph is a SPOILER: so I knew in advance, just from the setup that the cop was going to get bounced over the allegation, even if a retraction was printed in the paper. He was going to be sacrificed to placate the mob calling for justice. This much made sense, but then there was the twist: the brass would likely say, "See, look, there are brutal black cops as well as white cops." NOPE! I don't buy that. First off, I wouldn't think that the brass would ever concede to brutal cops, even if there are a few bad apples, but the race thing screws it all up. The "mobs" in NYC would probably be more outraged that a black officer is thrown off the force while white officers remain. Moreover, and maybe I'm being cynical, but I believe that the groundswell against the cops would be lessened by the fact that it was a black cop using force against (I'm inferring, if this wasn't outright stated) a white criminal.
Checking online I see that it will be nine stories (novellas) altogether, each telling a piece of the story. The nine part was failry obvious from the mention of 9 weapons a number of times in the story. Honestly, I was surprised one of the two didn't jump to that conclusion earlier, even if they were primarily concerned with this murder.
Will I read more? I wouldn't say no. Will I buy any? Probably not. I'll check the library at some point. I have a lot of stuff to read. (A quick check of two libraries shows no results. Oh, well.)
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