Suspension (Tom Braddock Series, 1) - Softcover

Crabbe, Richard E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312284640 ISBN 13: 9780312284640

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002

Synopsis

May 31, 1883, 3:55 p.m. Twenty thousand men, women, and children, their faces shining in the late afternoon sun, are strolling the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Brooklyn Bridge is open just a week, its promenade a magnet for the teeming masses of New York and Brooklyn. An engineering marvel of transcending beauty, the bridge is simply breathtaking.

In precisely five minutes, it will fall.

Seven desperate men, former Confederate soldiers turned saboteurs, have labored for years to destroy the bridge, which they saw as a symbol of hated Yankee supremacy.

Sergeant Detective Tom Braddock is one step behind the conspirators. Working through a series of murderous dead-ends, Braddock has dogged the seven men from the cables of the bridge to the shadowy alleys of the Lower East Side and the back streets of Richmond, Virginia. Slowly, he has slowly drawn closer to the unthinkable truth, a truth that none can accept...

About this title

About the Author

Richard E. Crabbe has a 20-year career in advertising sales with Advance Publications, The New York Post, Times Mirror, and currently Time Warner. Suspension was penned substantially on the Staten Island ferry, commuting to Manhattan. He is a lifelong resident of Staten Island, where his wife Kim and three daughters, Chelsea, Amanda, and Rebecca have him happily outnumbered.

From Publishers Weekly

Crabbe debuts with a cunningly imagined historical fiction set in New York City in 1883. The richly atmospheric thriller tells the story of a scheme by a group of former Confederate soldiers to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, which is under construction. The saboteurs, led by former Civil War Capt. Thaddeus Sangree, view the bridge as a symbol of the North's moral corruption and misguided desire for unity. Sangree's own secret motivation is personal: his brother, Franklin, was killed at Gettysburg, and Sangree holds former Union Col. Washington Roebling responsible for his brother's death. Roebling's father designed the Brooklyn Bridge and the younger Roebling is its chief engineer. The scheme has been meticulously planned for years, with saboteurs obtaining jobs working on the bridge so they can understand its weak points. However, when they kill a bridge mason who has caught on to their plan, the murder attracts the attention of bulldog police detective Tom Braddock. Braddock sniffs out the plot through a combination of dogged pursuit, investigative cunning and the brute force that was common practice in 19th-century law enforcement. The action covers a wide spectrum of 1880s New York life, drawing upon a large cast of believable characters, but it centers on the city's disease-infested tenements. Crabbe, who worked in the advertising industry for 20 years, falters occasionally in tone, vacillating between gritty period drama and modern, too clever dialogue. However, he has effectively re-created a time when America was attempting to heal old wounds while steadying itself for a great industrial thrust forward. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0312284640
• ISBN 13: 9780312284640
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480