State Street - Hardcover

Sportswriter Whittingham (Saturday Afternoon, 1986) turns to fiction with this gritty, overplotted Chicago procedural. Ex-homicide cop Joe Morrison, now with the Sixth Precinct's Organized Crime unit, takes on all the activities appropriate to his genre--getting divorced by his wife, going back on the streets to investigate a homicide with personal overtones (the robbery/murder of his father's longtime pharmacist friend Theo Warner), finding a promising new romance (Linda Tate, former mistress of commodities trader Dennis Courtland, a suspect in the Warner killing), tangling with organized crime (Rudy Facia, the capo who refuses to press charges when his daughter is raped--but wants the police to let him know the minute they have any leads), and putting the squeeze on known lowlifes (like Tommy Bates, who looks even better than Courtland for the Warner job, and Vinny Salerno, a wonderfully witless stoolie). Morrison does all of this with energy (if an occasional lack of direction) while he's waiting for his partner Norbert Castor to get shot--and it's no surprise when the Mafia daughter's rape peters out (though Whittingham manages one neat twist even after the case seems dead) in the excitement of nailing Castor's assailant and wrapping up the Warner case. Smart pace and authentically nasty atmosphere and detail enliven this somewhat lumpish descent into the bowels of the Windy City. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Whittingham ( Joe D: On the Street with a Chicago Homicide Cop ) makes his debut as a novelist with this powerful, exciting police procedural. Sgt. Joe Morrison and his ever-hungry partner Norbert Castor call in political favors, use street snitches as eyes and ears and cover the neighborhood like Jehovah's Witnesses to track down the two men--one black, one white--who raped the retarded daughter of a mob capo. The mafioso himself refuses to cooperate, preferring his own methods of protecting his family and turf. Then a pharmacist is found robbed and drowned in a 50-gallon drum at his store. Clues point to Uptown, Chicago's worst slum, and Tommy Bates, a "major street animal"; his whorish, drughead girlfriend, Jo Kane; and Manfred White, a black dope dealer. When his partner is shot, Morrison responds like Sam Spade in a similar situation (a man's "supposed to do something about it"). Telling a lie within earshot of a snitch, he ensures a kind of rough justice, which brings this no-frills story to an ironic but most satisfactory end.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.