The Cold Room

December 5, 2011
Ex-cop turned defense lawyer Knightly knows his way around New York City crime, as shown by his second police procedural featuring NYPD’s Harry Corbin (after 2009’s Bodies in Winter). Corbin, a pariah at his job because he’s aired departmental dirty laundry in public, is in his fifth precinct in nine months. When a subway disaster on the Brooklyn Bridge leaves his unit shorthanded, Corbin welcomes the opportunity to serve as the crime scene and investigating officer on a grisly murder in Williamsburg. With no one rushing to identify the female victim, the case gets low priority. Corbin finds evidence the dead woman was a Polish immigrant with a link to a Catholic church, but the shield of the confessional bars further progress. While Corbin lacks the sophistication of the best examples of leads in this subgenre, Knightly makes him interesting enough to sustain the reader’s attention.

February 15, 2012
A disgraced cop seizes an unexpected opportunity to redeem his reputation. Hardboiled narrator Harry Corbin catches the case of a dead Jane Doe found along the East River by a beat cop. Noting that rigor mortis has not yet set in and that the victim has been gutted, Harry takes some photos and concludes that the woman was killed elsewhere and dumped here. Clyde Kelly, an elderly ex-con with a prosthetic leg whom Harry finds near the scene, nervously protests his innocence while describing a 50ish thug with "eyes like slits." Harry sees an opportunity for much-needed redemption in this crime. He's been a pariah ever since blowing the whistle on a clutch of dirty cops in his department. While trying to clear Harry's name, his partner Adele Bentibi, who is also his live-in lover, was beaten by a bad cop named Linus Potter, though she managed to put him away. Now working as an investigator for the Queens DA, she's the ideal sidekick for Harry in the case--and he badly needs her help, since he's iced out of murder investigations by the department. Brooklyn's large immigrant community and a charismatic Catholic priest called Father Stan, who feels a duty to protect them, figure prominently in Harry's probe, which proceeds piece by (initially) baffling piece. As the picture becomes clearer, so does the danger to Harry. Knightly's gritty prose is sometimes marred by an awkward formality, but his second Harry Corbin novel (Bodies in Winter, 2009) moves with dark deliberation and feels authentic in every detail.

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December 1, 2011
Unorthodox, unethical, and unreliable are among the kinder epithets bestowed on NYPD cop Harry Corbin by his colleagues, several of whom he has put behind bars following a major corruption scandal involving some of the top cops in the department. Exiled to low-priority cases, Corbin stumbles on the body of a young woman, naked, battered, and gutted. With nothing much on his agenda, Corbin vows to find the girl's killer and bring him (or her) to justice, despite the fact that the higher-ups don't want Corbin anywhere near the case. His investigation soon draws him into a complex web involving human trafficking, the Catholic Church, Eastern European immigrants, Chechen rebels, and one of New York's richest families. Clever plotting, plenty of unexpected twists, high-octane action, taut suspense, and a hero who is as admirable and daring as he is rude and gutsy make this compelling new installment in the Harry Corbin series a must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)