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Summary
Summary
On July 8 Jorge "Finito" Rakowski is released from the Otus Bantam Correctional Center on Rikers Island, where he has served ninety days for Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree; he's a thief. Nine months, thirteen victims, and several Latino aliases later, the handsome, sandy-haired Finito, whose magnetism only begins in his penetrating green eyes, has with deadly invention raised his criminal stakes. He has become a serial killer. In this gripping, new police procedural, the enthusiastically reviewed David Cray again lays bare the ambitions and betrayals among New York City's police detectives at the same time that he explores the darker side of the criminal mind. For NYPD's Belinda Moore--confident, cool, professional, black--and her dogged, promotion-hungry partner, Pudge Pedersson, find themselves not only baffled as to the identity of the notorious, slippery, and increasingly desperate Break-In Killer, but also battling, and defying, their superiors in the police bureaucracy. More and more, Belinda and Pedersson realize they can't crack the case and play by the book. What they don't realize is where the case--and a perp who's on to them--is dangerously, maybe even fatally, taking them.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
It's Project Intercept versus the Break-In Killer in this predictable, irresistible procedural from cold-eyed Cray. The day after he's released from his latest stint on Rikers Island, Jorge (Finito) Rakowski discovers quite accidentally that he likes to hurt women. It's not enough to rob prostitutes or even to strangle them; he wants to keep his victims alive long enough to torture them, and he wants to move up the food chain to women who don't use drugs or sell their bodies so that the monstrous threat he embodies can humiliate and dehumanize them even further. It isn't till Finito's honed his growing skills on his fourth victim that the NYPD has any clue that a serial killer is at work. When Det. Belinda Moore and her white partner, Pudge Pedersson, offer the opinion that the murder bears telltale marks of an earlier killing, they're brushed off by the Chief of Detectives office. Even after the top cops have finally launched Project Intercept, Belinda and Pudge, still as far ahead of their colleagues as they are behind Finito, keep landing in the doghouse because their unbridled enthusiasm for the case keeps leading them to crippling breaches of protocol. All of this may sound excruciatingly familiar, but Cray (What You Wish For, 2002, etc.) writes with a gimlet eye for his perp's ugly fantasies and his cops' frustrating missteps that makes you forget how often you've seen it all before. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
NYPD detectives Belinda Moore and Pudge Pedersson are partners with decidedly differents agendas. She wants to retire soon with a good pension, and Pudge wants to get promoted. Both are good detectives, a quality that becomes obvious when they pull two seemingly disparate killings: a female street hooker and an upper-middle-class businesswoman. Their concerns of a serial killer fall on politically sensitized ears, but as the bodies continue to accumulate, Moore and Pedersson's superiors grudgingly form a task force. As the case progresses, so does the killer's depravity and cunning. Inflicting death is like no drug he's ever known; he'll either keep killing or die trying. Cray, a pseudonym for a well-known mystery writer, will draw comparisons to Ed McBain. He has a similar sense of the street cop's ceaseless conflict between home and profession as well as the struggle to do a job well in a highly politicized environment. An outstanding procedural, both for its chilling portrayal of the killer's dementia and for its prickly view of a bureaucracy's painfully slow attempt to contend with it. --Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
When Jorge "Finito" Rakowski gets out of the Otus Bantam Correctional Center on Rikers Island, where he served 90 days for criminal mischief in the fourth degree, he is broke and has no job. But he is also an accomplished thief and scam artist. He decides to rob a young prostitute he spots on the street, but the woman fights back, and he is forced to kill her. Finito immediately realizes that he enjoys killing, and thus the saga of a serial killer known as "The Break-In Killer" begins. Detectives Belinda Moore and Pudge Pedersson, who are assigned to the case of Finito's third victim, notice during the investigation a similarity between this and other murder cases: all of the victims' faces have been covered. Cray (Little Girl Blue) has a way of making police procedure come alive, even when describing the detectives playing politics, going through mountains of reports looking for similar murders, and following rules that may mean the killer will get away. He also has a deft hand in describing Finito's disintegration. The ending is true justice and a shocker. An exceptional police procedural, this belongs in all fiction collections. [David Cray is the pseudonym of a well-known mystery writer residing in New York.-Ed.]-Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights- University Heights P.L., OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
