A Long December by
Donald Harstad
pbk out December 03
(Fourth Estate)
at £10.99
Another good, solid police procedural from the pen of a real copper - or at
least a cop, as he's in Iowa. The author has been a member of a small police
department in the Midwest for twenty-seven years and as a former deputy
sheriff, knows his stuff, as previous books have shown.
His hero is Carl Houseman, a fictional deputy sheriff in a rural area, where
some of his problems revolve around the budget for tyres on the two police
cars!
This saga is written in a clever and very suspenseful way, as the chapters
alternate between Houseman and three others being pinned down by gunmen
in a barn at a derelict farm - and the story of circumstances which landed
them there. As usual, it is hard to give much description of the story without
spoiling it for readers, but it all stems from a murder on a country road,
where a man with his hands tied behind his back has his head literally blown
off by a shotgun. This apparently solitary rural crime rapidly escalates into a
national terrorist alert, as it is linked to a poisoning at a local meat plant that
supplied kosher beef to delicatessens in New York.
Rapidly, the FBI and every other agency in the United States descend on this
little backwater and from then on the reader is deluged with acronyms. One
sentence actually read "There were people representing the FBI, DOJ, CDC,
FDA, DEA, ATF, OSHA and NSA, as well as command level people from
DCI and DNE, as well as the EMD."
Don't let this put you off, I think the author did it with tongue in cheek, just
as he uses all the numeric radio codes in his dialogue. In a previous book,
Code 61, he gave an appendix listing all the Iowa State police radio-speak!
The writing has the authority and immediacy of someone who knows the
territory and the procedures inside out and there has to be much in the
content that is autobiographical.
A first-class read which is both exciting and amusing - I look forward to the
next one.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
A Long December by
Donald Harstad
