Fury

The 17th of Tanenbaum's thrillers with the duo of Manhattan District Attorney Dutch Karp and his renegade wife, Marlene Ciampi, is the fourth of this series read by Lee Sellars. This time the plot is a combination of political corruption, police cover-ups, terrorist plots, kidnapping, and a professor's alleged rape of a student. The plot is a little too complicated, but Sellars's comfort level with the characters allows the story lines to flow. Without his experience, scenes involving Karp's "circle of friends" would be difficult to understand. Sellars clearly delivers the fast-paced dialogue and keeps the characters defined. In the final minutes Tanenbaum opens the door to book Number 18. Can't wait! R.B.T. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

July 11, 2005
At the center of Tanenbaum's scattershot, complicated 17th entry in his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series (Hoax
, etc.)
is a decade-old rape perpetrated by four young men beneath the Coney Island Pier. The so-called Coney Island Four were eventually caught and sent to prison, but an oily, race-baiting lawyer, Hugh Louis, has managed to free them and is now filing a $250 million lawsuit against the city of New York. Karp, Manhattan's district attorney, smells corrupt cooperation between Brooklyn's political establishment and the lawyer, and at the request of the mayor, he steps in to defend the city. Though Tanenbaum effectively brings readers inside the world of crime, politics and the law, he bloats the thriller with distracting subplots. In a boilerplate Tanenbaum twist, a terrorist cell led by a brutal Iraqi takes over an abandoned subway tunnel and takes a member of Karp's family hostage as part of its plan to blow up Times Square on New Year's Eve. Meanwhile, Karp's wife, Ciampi, works to exonerate a college professor accused of rape at the same time she pitches in on the Coney Island Four case. It's too bad Tanenbaum has overstuffed his latest thriller: somewhere beneath the layers of fat there's a svelte, snappy story.