cover image Tight Case

Tight Case

Edward J. Hogan. MacMillan Publishing Company, $0 (275pp) ISBN 978-0-02-553330-1

DEA special agent Ed Fleming knows that his job is leading to burnout. He isn't making cases, the NYPD has busted his best snitch and the new agent in charge is down on him. To top it off, Fleming's second marriage is disintegrating, a victim, like the first one, of the pressures of his job. Then he gets a line that may lead him right to the top of a major Mafia crime family. Throwing departmental regulations and domestic circumspection to the winds, Fleming rushes to an explosive confrontation with the mob. This grittily violent first novel is unsparingly gory; among other bloody scenes, there's a brutally graphic depiction of a mob execution by means of a meat-hook. Former undercover narcotics agent Hogan presumably knows the milieu he describes. One hopes, though, that he has exaggerated a world in which the cops seem barely less vile than the villains. (November)