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Summary
Summary
"A must read. I couldn't put the sucker down."--Stephen King
Nathaniel Dresden never really got along with his father, an infamous civil rights lawyer who defended criminals and spearheaded protest movements. As an act of rebellion, Natty joined the U.S. Army and served in Iraq, coming back with a chest full of commendations and a head full of disturbing memories.
But when his father is found murdered near the peaceful confines of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, Natty is forced to deal with the troubled legacy of their unresolved relationship. He also has to fend off the growing suspicions of NYPD Detective Lourdes Robles, a brash Latina cop with something to prove, who thinks Natty might bear some responsibility for his father's death. Though truth be told, the list of people--cops and criminals--who wanted David Dresden out of the way is long. The search for answers leads Natty and Lourdes into an urban labyrinth where they must confront each other--and the brutal truths that could destroy them both.
Proving Ground , New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winner Peter Blauner's first novel in more than a decade, is a sweeping crime novel, an intricate story about the quest for redemption, and a vibrant portrait of contemporary New York City, all told in Blauner's singular voice.
Author Notes
PETER BLAUNER is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder . He spent the 1980s covering crime, politics and other forms of socially-abhorrent behavior for New York magazine. For the past decade he has been working in television, writing for several shows in the Law & Order franchise and the CBS show Blue Bloods . He was born and raised in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Although it has been 11 years since Slipping into Darkness, Edgar-winner Blauner hasn't lost his touch, as this page-turner demonstrates. Iraq war veteran Nathaniel Dresden (aka Natty Dread) has returned to New York City for the funeral of his murdered father, lawyer David Dresden. The senior Dresden was suing the FBI on behalf of a Muslim mail carrier, whom they seized and turned over to the Macedonians for "enhanced interrogation." When detectives Lourdes Robles and Kevin Sullivan catch the case, they find a suspicious pattern of calls from the senior Dresden to the New York FBI office. Natty begins to help his father's partner, Benjamin Grimaldi, continue the suit, hoping to discover more about his father's murder. They don't have an easy time piecing together the murder case or the case against the FBI, but the connections between the two eventually become too great to ignore. Blauner has crafted two strong and complex leads in Natty and Lourdes and given readers an intricate plot that never feels forced. 100,000 announced first printing. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management Literary Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The murder of a liberal lawyer in Brooklyn puts his Iraq War veteran son and two detectives on a collision course in this complex, character-rich tale.The victim, David Dresden, was suing the FBI in connection with the rendition of a Muslim-American mailman who was tortured and imprisoned for five years based on the false claims of a fellow Muslim worker. Detective Lourdes Robles, trying to redeem herself after a public-relation mess her partner instigated, catches the case with the almost-retired, almost mystical Detective Kevin Sullivan. The crime scene looks wrong, and suspicion falls on the FBI. Then it falls on Dresden's son, Nathaniel, who was practicing law in Florida but returned to New York just before the murder and is facing imprisonment for severely beating a firemanwhich he doesn't remember doing, having blacked out. The complications mount when David's law partner, Ben Grimaldi, a father figure to Nathaniel, seems to have won too many cases in which unfriendly witnesses were killed. Blauner (Slipping into Darkness, 2006, etc.) gives his characters a lot of room to move and grow. Lourdes is forced to recall her father's betrayals as she tries to prove herself in the largely male world of the NYPD. Nathaniel struggles with unresolved friction and guilt regarding his father and doesn't relish challenging the paternal-surrogate side of Ben. Meanwhile, he frequently suffers from PTSD's dark memories, especially the accidental killing of a boy during his two tours in Iraq. His eventual confrontation with the child's father, who has immigrated to New Jersey, is a remarkable scene and one that gives a compelling twist to the father-child and sin-redemption themesonly to be one-upped by a doozy of a twist in the murder plot. A top-notch crime novel that avoids easy resolutions and is all the better for its unanswered questions. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
David Dresden, a crusading criminal attorney who has plagued the NYPD by providing skilled counsel for people the cops want behind bars, is murdered outside his Brooklyn home. For his son, Nathaniel, aka Natty Dread, who developed PTSD in Iraq, there is sorrow, but he's been estranged from his father for a long time, and nearly anything can trigger nightmarish thoughts of Sadr City. For David's braggadocious, combative law partner, Ben Grimaldi, it means that David's $12 million suit against the FBI has become his case. For Lourdes Robles, an ambitious young detective in an overwhelmingly male environment, catching the Dresden case is either a great opportunity or a career ender. She is paired with Kevin Sullivan, a taciturn legend among Brooklyn cops but who may have lost his edge after 40 years on the force. Proving Ground has a lot of moving parts. The primary characters (including Brooklyn itself) are vividly drawn and compelling, and character drives the plot, which is convoluted but ultimately believable. Fine entertainment for crime-fiction lovers.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE 2000S WERE THRILLING here in America, in the most strictly neutral sense of the word - sensation after sensation, the fall of the towers, two wars, financial collapse, natural disaster, fear. Adults responded, very sanely one could argue, by devoting the period to reading about teenage vampires. (Or waiting on Platform 9¾ for the next train to Hogwarts.) Then things slowly stabilized, and perhaps our mood shifted too. The immense success of "Gone Girl" in 2012 seemed to consolidate that sense: The most popular novels could be about grown-ups again. Less frightened that our houses might be taken, we began to wonder instead who might hurt us while we were inside them. But this summer and fall will bring, depending on the vicissitudes of publishing industry timing, the last of those Obama-era thrillers. What are people going to read during a Donald Trump administration? Precisely how thrilling will these years prove? And just how much will we long to escape them? What a shame it would be to revert to the reading habits of the "Twilight" age, if it meant missing out on books as subtle, brilliant and mature as Karen Dionne's newest novel, THE MARSH KING'S DAUGHTER (Putnam, $26). It's the narrative of Helena, the child of a teenager and her abductor, who kept them hidden for years in a beautiful lost corner of Michigan. "I didn't know we were captives until we were not," Helena says. Her understanding of the world during that time comes largely from a stack of old National Geographic magazines and what her father - a master tracker and hunter named Jacob, part Ojibwa, charismatic, domineering, loving and cruel - teaches her to believe. The novel begins 15 years after her escape, Helena having made a life for herself, with a family and a small business selling jam made with cattails, a wisp of wilderness knowledge obscure enough to appeal to hipsters, a nice metaphor for the chasm between her childhood and theirs. Then her father escapes from prison, killing two guards. Helena immediately thinks of her daughters. She knows which one he would take, she realizes, and this horrifying unbidden thought decides her. "If anyone is going to catch my father and return him to prison, it's me. No one is my father's equal when it comes to navigating the wilderness, but I'm close." The book adopts a plaited structure, with alternating chapters set in the past and the present, the former relating the tale of Helena's flight from the marsh where she grew up, the latter her return to it to search for the man who raised her. Two elements make Dionne's book so superb. The first is its authenticity. There's a strain in the contemporary American novel ("Maud's Line," by Margaret Verble, and "The Snow Child," by Eowyn Ivey, are recent examples) defined by a knowledge of nature that feels intimate, real and longitudinal, connected to our country's past. When Dionne describes the swamp maples that make a cabin invisible from the air, or the way one digs chicory taproots, then washes, dries and grinds them to make a coffee substitute, it seems effortless, plain that her fluency has a deeper source than Wikipedia. The second is the corresponding authenticity of Helena's emotions about her father, painfully revisited and refined as she tracks him. She has no doubt whatsoever that he belongs in prison, but she doesn't hate him - or at least, part of her hatred is love. She recalls him putting on his waders every spring, going into the marsh and digging up a marigold for their porch. "It glowed like he'd brought us the sun," she says. One of her daughters is named Marigold. In its balance of emotional patience and chapter-bychapter suspense, "The Marsh King's Daughter" is about as good as a thriller can be, I think. Take Dionne's ending, usually the moment when, as E. M. Forster said, a novel's plot exacts its cowardly revenge. In most such books, Helena's daughters would come into jeopardy. But this author isn't interested in feeding us those cheap calories. Nor does she quite grant us the confessional reckoning we wish Jacob would finally give his daughter. Then again, how many terrible fathers - terrible, precious - ever have? Like everything else in "The Marsh King's Daughter," the choice feels right. The title character of LOLA (Crown, $26), by Melissa Scrivner Love, is also in a race to preserve her life, but in a location as different from the cold, unyielding woods of Michigan as possible: gangland Los Angeles at the height of summer. The book's plot, which involves a botched money handoff, is thorny - at one point Lola thinks of her choice of which drug kingpin to betray as belonging to some "awful romantic comedy" - but makes the usual basic urgent sense: We want Lola (tough, resourceful, tender whenever her circumstances on the periphery of the drug trade allow her to be) to keep being alive, and not start being dead. I blazed through "Lola," a debut as fast, flexible and poised as a chef's knife. At its best it has the lithe energy of a Lee Child novel, combined with Dennis Lehane's - or, to step outside of the genre, Stuart Dybek's - sense of the exhausting intimacy of poor neighborhoods. "What would she have done," Lola wonders, "if she'd grown up in a two-story ranch house far from South Central? What would she have done if she'd had a mother who defrosted vegetables every night for dinner?" Crime fiction, because its exigencies feel natural, has been our country's best way of thinking about class for more than a century now. In its weaker moments "Lola" suffers from a certain teleplay sleekness, picked up, perhaps, during its author's stints at "CSI: Miami" and "Person of Interest." To take one instance, Lola, who was the victim of sexual abuse in service to her mother's drug addiction, spends a lot of her scarce free time trying to protect a girl in an exactly identical situation, a symmetry that feels executive- filtered, false to life. The book's ventures into philosophy are similarly inert. ("All people everywhere, rich or poor, skinny or fat, are animals," we learn. "Looking for a fight. Looking to turn everyone against the weakest." Blurgh.) But it's still an unshakably engrossing read, and in Lola and her allies, who trace their connection to the familiar blocks they've loved and loathed their whole lives, Love is vibrant and cleareyed, an exciting new West Coast observer. Like Love, Peter Blauner has taken his turn in the Hollywood churn, writing for the television drama "Blue Bloods," but somehow, perhaps because he first spent a long career in journalism and fiction, he remains obstinately idiosyncratic in PROVING GROUND (Minotaur, $25.99), his first novel in 10 years. His garrulousness salvages a story that's only intermittently engaging. Blauner's tale involves the murder of David Dresden, an idealistic lawyer with a significant case pending against the F.B.I. He's shot in Prospect Park, and immediately two people sense deeper machinations - Dresden's son, Natty, a veteran with PTSD, and a zaftig, astute young police detective named Lourdes, fighting to make it in a department designed without her interests particularly close to its heart. They converge from different angles on the same possible perp, who is, alas, catastrophically easy to spot. Luckily the people who fall for "Proving Ground" will care far more about its voice, filled with moments of surprising New York stoop-sitting joy. Blauner is a bad-ball hitter - he'll miss on an easy description, overwriting Dresden's widow for instance ("a long-backed Park Slope lioness with vaguely Eurasian-looking features"?), but then capture with beautiful easy precision, for instance, a flash of dialogue between cops, who talk skells and Rockefeller time, "flip tin," banter at each other to signal that they care. The cynosure of this style is Richard Price, and Blauner shares his intricate gabbiness. But Price's gift(particularly in "Clockers," his masterpiece) is partially for invisibility, for the lurk; Blauner is always there, writing his way into every line. It slows the book down. "Lola" is a better widget than "Proving Ground," better paced, clearer in its stakes. But Blauner's fable seems truer to its emotional beats, Natty and Lourdes powerfully real in their lucid, disillusioned idealism. In both characters, Blauner returns repeatedly to the book's truest subject, the inescapability of the past. "Why keep looking back?" Natty asks his therapist, irritated, when he's on the verge of solving his father's murder. "Because that's probably where the answers are," she replies. New York, drawn so lovingly in "Proving Ground," has always been the city closest to matching Baudelaire's definition of beauty: the infinite within the finite. IF WE WERE VILLAINS (Flatiron, $25.99), a melodramatic but satisfying debut by M. L. Rio, takes as its subject the only infinite writer we've had yet, no matter how hard Karl Ove Knausgaard pushes - Shakespeare, of course. The book is set across a school year at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a Midwestern analogue to Juilliard, "less an academic institution than a cult," where seven senior actors immerse themselves with radical intensity in both one another and the works of the glovemaker's son from Stratford-on-Avon. One of their passionately close-knit number, Oliver, narrates their tale, years later. The twist is that he does it just as he's getting out of prison. The novel's first third is plotted ingeniously, as we wonder who might die. The bully during "Julius Caesar"? The seductress during "Macbeth"? At last a body falls. The rest of the novel is a whodunit, occasionally clumsy but entertaining. The solution, when we learn it at last, proves clever, and as the book ends the six remaining students, older and scattered now, move tentatively toward the idea of reunion. RIO'S MODEL COULDN'T be clearer: "The Secret History," by Donna Tartt. But this is not that eerie, half-mad novel; it's too nerdily good-natured, and too nerdily (and winningly) in love with Shakespeare. Every page is scattered with his words, which the students toss at one another as easily and endlessly as a shared second language. There's a kind of elation in seeing both famous and obscure phrases from the plays plucked and resituated, the effect first-rate - distancing, salutary. "If We Were Villains" is, then, a readable, smart, pretentious, youthful book, at once charming and insufferable, at once good and bad. It's steeped in the hysterical significance the young ascribe to their own lives. Middleaged readers often tend to scorn this sort of hothouse fictional narcissism. (I know, having written a novel about an American at Oxford that everyone younger than 31 seemed to love, and everyone older than 31 seemed to loathe.) But perhaps there's something forgetful in that rejection. "We . . . looked at each other with wide, unguarded eyes," Oliver says in the hovering moment before a kiss, and this is a book with wide, unguarded eyes. Most of us looked at the world that way once: not so happy, yet much happier. Rio, however clunky her book's characters and plotting can sometimes be, captures that, the exhilarating dummy immortality of youth. She may become a more adroit writer, but she won't become a younger one. That's a trade that people with more experience can be too sure is in their favor. As Joan Didion observed, it's best "to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." The protagonist of William Christie's panoramic, smart, hugely enjoyable thriller A SINGLE SPY (Minotaur, $25.99) does nothing but keep on nodding terms with who he used to be, because he knows that keeping a careful genealogy of his identities is his only chance of staying alive. His name is (sometimes) Alexsi and he stands out in his orphanage for his resourcefulness and instinct for escape; these gifts, after a brief interlude running guns in Iran, lead to his recruitment as a Russian spy, just in time for World War II. Hurray. That recruitment is the fulcrum of "A Single Spy," but despite being a war novel it's more "Odyssey" than "Iliad," with its hero on the perpetual run. Alexsi twists out of countless dead ends, and Christie does, too; each time his tale seems to be drawing into a cul-de-sac, he pulls it sharply and headily in some new direction, from Azerbaijan to Moscow to Germany, Alexsi shifting between passports, killing easily when he must, trying to balance the ruthless spymasters who would be delighted to sacrifice his disloyalty to the state. "Ugadat, ugodit, utselet," Alexsi tells himself. "Sniffout, suck up, survive." This is a subject too little acknowledged in thrillers, the giftthat some people have for life, for going on living. Because of his (marvelously credible) character, Alexsi's survival seems both impossible and inevitable. The spy novel keeps trying to save the world, but the beauty of "A Single Spy," what makes it a truly great example of a genre that has not lately been very good at all, is how closely it sticks to Alexsi's crucial, statistically meaningless survival, the slight cant of his personhood. It reminded me in this sense of "The Orphan Master's Son," by Adam Johnson, another novel about a state's unrelenting effort to deindividualize its members. Of course, the problem with humans is that the largest unit they come in is one; otherwise, totalitarianism would be a breeze. Alexsi's stubborn defiance of any state's rules - he betrays Russia to Germany to England to Russia to England, betrays everyone but himself - captures a thread that runs through all five of these worthwhile novels, the idea of holding out against dishonesty, slipping through its maze to remain true to one's self. Who knows how relevant that example may become in the next 1,250 days? What are your favorite thrillers for the beach? "At the top of my list is John Grisham's 'Camino Island,' a 'trouble in paradise' tale in which a central character is a bookseller. Noah Hawley's 'Before the Fall' takes offafter a mysterious plane crash. I'm also a fan of Y.A. - E. Lockhart's 'We Were Liars' has a twist most readers won't see coming." -JAMES PATTERSON
Library Journal Review
In the latest from Edgar Award winner (Slow Motion Riot) and TV producer (Blue Bloods) Blauner, an Iraq war veteran returns home to New York following the murder of his father, an activist attorney who was suing the FBI for the "enhanced interrogation" of his Muslim client. Nathaniel Dresden, armed with a law degree and barely suppressed postwar rage, turns to his father's law partner Ben Grimaldi for a chance to work on the case. His efforts catch the attention of Brooklyn detective Lourdes Robles, in need of redemption after a public embarrassment that nearly ended her career, and her inscrutable partner Kevin Sullivan. As Natty's personal investigation begins to expose secrets such as old flames and killed witnesses, all of Natty's loyalties-to himself, to Ben, even to his father-will be challenged. Blauner writes with depth but with urgency, especially in the revelatory final chapters, and his characters are vividly drawn. Verdict As complex and as gritty as a Richard Price book, Blauner's first novel in more than ten years was worth the wait. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]-Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.