cover image Blood Posse

Blood Posse

Philip Baker, Phillip Baker. St. Martin's Press, $13.95 (392pp) ISBN 978-0-312-13030-5

Set in the 1970s in the midst of a series of New York gang wars, Baker's tense debut follows a young Jamaican man as he descends into a world of urban crime. Danny Palmer is a Brooklyn high-school student whose life changes forever when his close friend is knifed to death for no better reason than prejudice against West Indians. Soon Dave finds himself dragged into a cycle of drugs, robberies and retribution, eventually joining a gang of deadly Rastamen. A run-in with the law results in a harrowing two-year prison stay, but when Danny gets out he only switches allegiance to the mob and turns to cocaine as his primary source of income-with deadly consequences. Baker, who wrote his book from a British penitentiary, clearly came by his subject the hard way, and the authority of his voice comes through in virtually every page of Danny's first-person narrative. There are some minor problems: the secondary characters remain almost completely undeveloped, and Baker's writing is uneven, occasionally lapsing into stilted construction and melodramatic phrasing. But the struggle between Jamaican immigrants and ``homeboys'' offers an intriguing perspective on standard racial themes and, combined with the author's narrative skills, makes him a name worth watching. (July)