I don’t really know anything about this book or author going in except that he’s probably talked about in Stephen King novels, because he loves to read old crime fiction. When I listened to the introduction to the novel I became pretty interested. Here’s the writer of The Blackboard Jungle (which, again, I didn’t know going in, but I’d seen the movie) deciding to create a series that is in part like a tv show, novels that take place within a single precinct of a police division in a large city, where no one character is the main character, but there’s a collective set of characters. All of that sounded great.
But man, this novel, which is at times ok, goes off the deep end throughout. There’s an interesting kind of terror going through the novel, similar to what a lot of us felt in Virginia and Maryland during the DC sniper shootings, in that you have a killer seemingly stalking police officers and killing in what seems like a random fashion. So far so good. The violence and starkness of the writing is also interesting and pretty gruesome for the time period (mid 1950s) and so also good.
But it’s so weirdly, arbitrarily, and grossly sexualized at times, it’s distracting. I really don’t need random sex scenes with cops and their wives and girlfriends in an otherwise straightforward novel. It kind of ties into the larger plot, but it always feels out of place when it’s happening, especially given that both the intro and the plot tell us not to get too attached to these characters.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Hater-87th-Precinct-Mysteries-Book-ebook/dp/B007MDDD52/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=cop+hater&qid=1573924789&sr=8-1)