Uncle Janice

October 13, 2014
The uncle of the title of this gripping, well-written book set on the mean streets of contemporary Queens is an undercover narcotics officer in the NYPD. “Uncle” Janice Itwaru, a New Yorker of Guyanese descent, poses as a drug addict to make “buys” of crack and other controlled substances; she is shadowed by a “ghost,” a fellow officer who makes the arrests. Burgess has crafted an urban picaresque, though Itwaru’s undercover identity and activities are potentially dangerous. But the relatively low level of narrative momentum (this is not a genre novel) is well compensated for by the rich, vibrant portrait of Queens’s vast underclass—from the suffering addicts and smalltime dealers to the cops who are more concerned with doing their job, surviving the tedium and drudgery, and moving their way up the NYPD food chain than making the streets safer from the scourge of drugs. Burgess (Dogfight, a Love Story) has a finely honed eye and a gift for rendering street-smart dialogue that is both credible and comic; he fully realizes Itwaru’s world and makes the reader understand just how futile most of the skirmishes in the war on drugs really are.

Starred review from December 15, 2014
The multicultural stew pot that is contemporary Queens is served up steaming in this pungently uproarious novel about a frenzied young policewoman advancing her career one drug buy at a time.If you've ever found-or, more likely, lost-yourself in the borough of Queens, New York, you don't need to be told how difficult it is to make your way around its somewhat bewildering landscape unless you (A) have grown up there or (B) carry a reliable GPS. This crime novel written by Queens native Burgess (Dogfight, A Love Story, 2011) evokes some of that hurly-burly as it chronicles several tumultuous weeks in the life of Janice Itwaru, an NYPD covert op desperate to climb from the dreary if sometimes-hazardous swamp of petty street buys to a detective's gold shield. In the process, Janice, who lives with her sickly Indian mom in Richmond Hill, must cope with the ribald taunts and elaborate pranks of her fellow "uncles" (as in undercover narcotics cops), whether on assignment or in their nondescript HQ labeled "the rumpus." If the additional harassment she faces each day from the dealers, thugs, flunkies and informers isn't bad enough, she's also pressured by her superior officer to meet her shifting quota of buys and bullied by an Internal Affairs cop from Manhattan into helping him get the goods on a shady "uncle." Less a conventionally plotted procedural than an anecdotal stream of harrowing encounters, scatological slapstick and polychromatic repartee, this is a multitextured chronicle of coming-of-age, or, perhaps more precisely, coming to terms with what it means to be a responsible grown-up struggling for truth, justice, love and value in a post-millennial urban universe where once-familiar boundary lines get blurrier every day. Is it possible that Burgess is doing for Queens what Junot Diaz is doing for New Jersey? No easy answer just yet, but this novel will make you wait for one to show up.

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Starred review from October 1, 2014

In Burgess's outstanding sophomore effort (after Dogfight, A Love Story), 24-year-old Janice Itwaru is an "uncle" for the NYPD, making controlled buys as an undercover narcotics officer, withstanding the good-natured ribbing of her fellow uncles, and counting the days until her 18 months comes up and she makes detective. But the Big Bosses have instituted a quota, and Janice, if she wants to earn that gold shield, needs to step up her game to include four buys a month, in an area where she is fast becoming a known face. As Janice attempts to scheme the hapless drug dealers of Queens in locations dank and desperate, while tending to her mother's descent into dementia and generally avoiding her alcoholic father, she begins to crack under the bureaucratic pressures of modern-day policing--and Internal Affairs may be watching her every move. VERDICT This fresh take on the cop novel genre retains the madcap energy of Elmore Leonard's best fiction while introducing the most irresistible police precinct this side of Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station. [See "Writers To Watch, from Scott Blackwood to David Whitehouse," Prepub Alert, 7/14/14.]--Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014
After 17 months as an undercover narc (or uncle ) in Queens, half-black and half-Indian Janice Itwaru is just a month from a detective badge when her captain pressures her to increase her drug buys. So when Janice sees an easy buy but fails to properly cover her partner, 17-year veteran Chester Tevis, she loses his trust but not his friendship. As the lives of uncles swing from boring to life-threatening, shortcuts sometimes are taken, and Internal Affairs targets Janice to inform on her sergeant, throwing her into turmoil as her potential promotion date nears. Meanwhile, her divorced mother, with whom Janice lives, is slipping further into dementia, and Janice must seek help from her estranged father, a reformed alcoholic who betrayed and battered her mother before he remarried. As in his well-received debut, Dogfight, a Love Story (2010), Burgess puts a humorous slant on deadly serious drug matters in this vivid portrayal of life on the streets, which swings from funny to gut-tighteningly suspenseful. Not likely to gain recruits for narcotics squads, but a tour-de-force of its type.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)