THE SHOOTER
PUBLISHED: NEL (hb&pb),UK; DELL, US; GALLIMARD, France; RATEKA, Hungary.
Paul Scott had been a good cop but he had taken money. Having served his sentence he is back on the streets looking for the person who killed his ex-partner. Now hunting for him.
Having spent three months researching a documentary on NYPD Homicide detectives in the 48 Preccinct in the South Bronx, I had to write this novel to clear the memories of murders, and of socializing with some great cops.
Just don’t start this long and classy nail-biter at 10 pm if you want to get your full ration of ZZZs. It starts with Paul, a U S tec who was on the take coming out of prison on
parole. Someone in the department turned him in, but he was not the only cop with his hand in the cookie jar .
Paul has wealthy BG and high-placed friends in the Mafia so lush hotel suite and a bundle of thousand-dollar notes are his welcome mat. His lovely, successful business- woman wife and kids still want him too. But Paul is obsessed with finding out who and why, especially after his best friend and cop partner, honourable Harry, is found shot in an apartment no-one knew he had, with a half-kilo of coke and $2,000 in cash lying around. Paul smells cover-up and goes into action with unofficial police backing. A real gripper . SCOTSMAN
THE opening half- dozen pages of THE SHOOTER are enough for Murari to weave a steel-strong web of suspense and tension tight enough to hold the reader until the final strand is cut in a brilliantly devised finale.
The unusual hero, Paul Scott, a great detective but a bad cop, has just been released from prison after serving a sentence for taking. .’kickbacks” when his former partner, Harry Margolis, is murdered and drugs planted in his apartment .
Scott, using an his old skills, contacts, and friends, sets out to avenge Margolis and clear his name, but soon senses that he too, is on the ‘hit list. As he seeks for a motive, with the thoroughness and ruthlessness that made him a first-class detective, his personal anxieties grow with kidnapping of his wife and daughters.
“The Shooter” is described as an entertainment. Perhaps it is, but in the style of Graham Greene, with an original plot and very real people making it a chilling thriller.
The New York background and characters are colourful and the pattern of police procedure is authentic, based on Mr Murari ‘s experiences in making a television documentary on homicide detectives in the South Bronx.
It is a tough, violent story, but there are moments of sensitivity and inner- as well as physical- strength which help to put The Shooter in the first division of crime writing. THE ECHO.
For Paul Scott. an ex-New York cop jailed for taking bribes prison is just the frying pan. Out on the streets, the fire awaits him in the shape of a vengeful victim of his once brilliant police work.
His struggle to snare his would-be assassin and his fumbling attempts to re-establish the forgotten rhythms of his family life, are rivetingly juxtaposed. Murari’s work with the Bronx homicide squad, for a series of TV films, supplies him with a wonderful grasp of its berserk idiom.
More significantly, under cover of a quicksilver story, he brilliantly traces the extraordinary nightmare that skirts the shores of affluent Manhattan. EVENING STANDARD, London.