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On a bitter, snow laded, New York winters day two lives are
unceremoniously snuffed out, murdered by, as yet, unknown
killers. In a rich and exclusive apartment building on York
Avenue, the body of Charles Lutnikov lays slumped in an elevator,
shot through the heart, the only lamentation to mark his passing
emanates from the lift door in which his leg is trapped. Across
town Ed Taxx and Cliff Collier guard, Alberta, a mob floozy
turned states witness, who has seen better days. Today will
be her last day, she is found by her two guardians knifed
in the neck, with only a small window as the possible point
of entry. These two crimes have one thing in common, an almost
complete lack of physical evidence which points to a killer.
Can the CSI experts bring their skills to bear to discover
the truth behind the crimes in time to catch the perpetrators
and bring them to justice?...
CSI:
NY Dead of Winter is a new book by Edgar award winning
author Stuart M. Kaminsky. Kaminsky has had a long, varied
and successful career as the author of more than forty books,
a lot of short stories and screen writer on various films
including one of my favourites, Sergio Leone's Once upon
a Time in America to which he contributed dialogue. So,
no one can accuse him of being a lightweight then. His style
of writing is eminently readable and a worthy addition to
the run of Crime Scene Investigation original novels.
I
guess it must be difficult to make, what would otherwise be
quite a dull premise, interesting. Like comic books, or any
genre that has certain formulaic restrictions, the detective
novel is generally slaved to the structure of crime-evidence
gathering-solution. Kaminsky shows that here he is in his
element as the plot hammers on, never seeming stale or repetitive.
On the down side he is, of course, limited by the canon of
the show. For any fan of the show I'm sure that this will
not present a restriction but a delight. I found that as a
casual reader that there were just too many characters to
take in and to follow.
From
the point of the plot, the narrative does not presuppose prior
knowledge of the show, as the murders and characters do not
directly address anything especially in the show. This is
both a strength and a weakness, in that, the novel can be
taken as a very well constructed murder/mystery, whilst at
the same time the sheer number of characters involved really
requires knowledge of the show to indicate their relationships
to each other. In this then, the book suffers from a lack
of space to create and develop the main protagonists as individual
characters; they end the story pretty much the way they began
it.
So, a definite buy for any fans of the show from a master
story teller, but for the casual reader it just might be a
little over packed with characters, making it difficult to
follow at times.
Charles
Packer
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