The Daughter She Used to Be

September 12, 2011
Noonan (In a Heartbeat) delivers another earnest drama exploring how lives and family relationships can, in a heartbeat, change utterly. The Sullivans are a family of New York City cops. The father, now retired and running a coffee shop–“Sully’s Cup”—near their local Queens precinct, is a legend in the community. They are the type of family that expresses disappointment when youngest daughter Bernadette, rather than marrying a cop, as did her sister Mary Kate, remains single and goes to work in the DA’s office. But that disappointment pales in comparison to what comes from her decision to volunteer her legal skills to help defend a man who entered Sully’s Cup seeking vengeance and killed several cops, including her brother, the youngest son in the family. The dramatic stakes are high in Noonan’s world (her husband, like Sully, retired from the NYPD), but the Sullivan family’s dialogues on faith, grief, and loyalty are riddled with overwrought clichés, as is her portrayal of the stereotype-perpetuating African-American shooter. Not helping is Noonan’s prose, perfunctory at best, a grammatical quagmire at worst.

October 15, 2011
The Sullivans are a New York police family. Father Sully is a retired officer who now owns Sully's Cup, the local cop hangout. Sons James and Brendan are police officers; daughter Mary Kate is married to an officer, Tony; and youngest daughter Bernadette is an assistant district attorney. When Brendan and two other officers are killed in a shooting at Sully's Cup, the family is irrevocably changed. Sully is driven nearly mad with a desire to kill the perpetrator, Petyon Curtis, while Bernadette is determined to save him from the death penalty. Noonan tells the story through multiple perspectives, including that of the killer, an emotionally disturbed man who is tormented by a childhood event and loses control when he is wrongfully arrested by Tony. The author of One September Morning (2009) once again takes on an emotional topic with great sensitivity. The family drama at the heart of this police novel is actually the novel's most compelling facet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)