Partners: A Novel of Crime

The pseudonymous Cray delivers a routine police procedural likely to disappoint fans of his courtroom thriller Bad Lawyer (2001) and his two books about NYPD detective Julia Brennan, Little Girl Blue (2001) and What You Wish For (2002). Belinda Moore, a tough, smart black woman, teams up with a hard-working but less gifted white NYPD cop, Pudge Pedersson. Both are saddled with an incompetent and racist lieutenant, Jerry Malden, who does his best to derail their efforts in tracking down a slippery serial killer, Jorge ""Finito"" Rakowski, recently released from prison on Riker's Island. Rakowski has the ability to work both sides of the ethnic street-passing himself off as a Hispanic drug user as well as a more romantic Greenwich Village resident-as he leaves behind a trail of murdered women. But Rakowski isn't terribly interesting in any other way, and both Moore and Pedersson with their familiar domestic concerns could have stepped right out of a dozen television shows or other cop novels. Even the dreary police politics has been done better, by everyone from Ed McBain to whomever David Cray really is. (Feb. 10)