Bag Men

Starred review from December 30, 1996
Spare writing and a roster of flawed, struggling characters highlight this terse, engrossing debut, which earns high marks for its original setting and plot. It's 1965 in Boston, just before the first English-language mass in America is to be celebrated by Cardinal Cushing. George Sedgewick, the priest who is delivering communion wafers personally blessed by the pope, is murdered at Logan Airport, and the hosts are stolen. In charge of the case is Ray Dunn, the ADA who fixes things for DA Johnny Cahill and cleans up after Johnny's playboy son, Eddie. Meanwhile, narcotics detective Manny Manning, searching for the supplier of a killer strain of heroin, hears about the imminent street presence of a new drug that's about to be declared illegal in the U.S., a drug called LSD. The two searches converge when the past of the dead priest points to electroshock therapy and secret experiments conducted at the naval base at Portsmouth. It's a bleak tale told with no frills--and no nobility either. In the world that Flood--a Boston federal prosecutor writing under a pseudonym--has created, no one is untainted: Ray Dunn is haunted by the arrest of his father in a police corruption scandal and is compromised by his clean-up activities for the DA; Manny Manning was an informant gathering evidence against his fellow cops for the feds; and even the Monsignor who knows Sedgewick lies. In Flood's 1965 Boston, there are no easy answers and no clear victors--except perhaps the pseudonymous Flood himself, a natural storyteller, who, with this accomplished first novel, has claimed his own piece of turf in the city of George Higgins and Robert Parker.

December 1, 1996
John Flood is the pseudonym of a Boston federal prosecutor with something to say. When the body of Father George Sedgewick is found on a Logan Airport runway on New Year's Day 1965, the 4000 Pontiff-blessed communion hosts he was escorting from Rome turn up missing. As young assistant district attorney Ray Dunn struggles with an absence of leads, wife Mary Pat and his young boys drift further and further away from him. Meanwhile, Manny Manning, a contemporary of Ray's crooked-cop father, finds himself chasing deadly concoctions of heroin laced with laxatives through the projects and contending with a new arrival on the scene called acid. The seemingly unrelated cases begin to intersect eerily. This portrait of 1960s Boston is faintly reminiscent of James Ellroy's writing, full of scenes that ring true. Recommended.--Susan A. Zappia, Maricopa Cty. Lib. Dist., Phoenix, Ariz.

January 1, 1997
Ray Dunn, son of a corrupt cop, is the assistant D.A. of Boston's Suffolk County and has an eye on the top spot. But on January 1, 1965, his world turns upside down. He learns that he's being passed over for the D.A. job, and he's assigned to the case of a murdered priest, which brings him in contact with a narcotics cop, Manny Manning, who worked with Ray's father. The connection between the two cases may be a naval department experimental program in which new pharmacology was administered to mentally disturbed sailors as an alternative to counseling. The author, working under a pseudonym, is a Boston native who works as a federal prosecutor. It's difficult to believe this is his debut. He subtly re-creates the Boston of three decades past, populates it with completely believable, vividly real characters, and provides a clever but plausible plot. This excellent thriller will have readers eagerly awaiting Flood's next effort. Highly recommended. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1997))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1997, American Library Association.)