BREAKING FAITH

Investigating the murder of a promising Yale student, undercover investigator Nase Nichols is uninterested in a new job opportunity, until he meets provocative lawyer Lynn Daniels and begins assisting a police official who has been set up

Boston PI Nason Nichols (Trade Secrets) gets a hard lesson in urban politics after the murder of a much-admired black college student during a police sweep in the youth's neighborhood. Recruited by an old friend to help a mayoral commission investigate allegations of police brutality against blacks, Nase begins to fear the probe is a sham to vindicate popular police commissioner Francis X. "Dapper" Flanagan. The commission seems stacked with members ready to do Mayor Conor O'Conor's bidding: the chairman is a venerated but perhaps doddering figurehead, and the chief investigator is the mayor's niece, blind prosecutor Peggy Kiernan. Even an activist critic, the Reverend Theophilus James, has changed his anti-police tune. Nase, digging deep, learns that a cop had been on the trail of the young student, who was not as exemplary as he seemed. With a sure grip on Boston's patois and politics, Thomson adeptly demonstrates how effectively political and financial interests can muster the power to steamroll even a high-profile murder case. While this brew may not have quite the depth of a George V. Higgins tale, it still delivers especially good scenes of pols and their pals on the make.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Murder is only the beginning of an endless chain of malfeasance in this bare-knuckled rondelet of Boston politics. It all begins when the cops fish Roxbury Yalie Purnell Whitmore out of a dumpster en route to Rev. Theophilus James's African Apostolic Temple of Glory. Police brutality! shrieks James when he hears that a white cop was seen entering the fatal alley with the scholar-athlete. Under pressure from the black community and the liberal Boston Hub, Hizzoner Conor O'Conor suspends Police Commissioner Francis X. Flanagan, architect of the ``Blue Tornado'' crackdown that's already divided the city, and appoints a blue-ribbon commission to look into Flanagan's reign. The hilariously ``balanced'' commission includes whiners and editorialists of every predictable sort, from Rev. James to the Mayor's blind niece, crack prosecutor Peggy Kiernan--and one wild card, snappy, well-connected private eye Nason Nichols (Trade Secrets, 1993). By the time he finds the hapless cop and turns him over to his avid colleagues--an arrest that leads at length to riots instead of a well-behaved denouement--Nase will be well on his way to getting the dirt on every shyster, developer, demagogue, and fellow blue-ribboner in town. He'll also have found out, incidentally, that Purnell Whitmore was not exactly the paragon he seemed. Scoundrels of every stripe are intent on turning every possible social interaction into a greedy sellout--yet Thomson's expert carpentry allows each delectable double-cross its full weight before proceeding to the next. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.