Falsely Accused

Butch Karp is not working for the City of New York anymore. Instead he's fighting City Hall. New York's chief medical examiner, Murray Selig, has been summarily fired without due cause, and Butch Karp, now in private practice, is suing the city for all this case of administrative malfeasance is worth.
His wife, Marlene Ciampi, is out of law enforcement as well. But she is doing more than keeping house and raising their young daughter. With street-savvy ex-cop Harry Bello, she has opened a private detective agency specializing in protecting threatened women from abusive men.
Their career paths seem miles apart. But questions arise that bring them ever closer together. What is the secret that two terrified children from Central America refuse to divulge? Why have murders of Guatemalan cab drivers by bent cops remained uninvestigated? Who is responsible for the brutal beating of Marlene's close friend, freewheeling investigative reporter Ariadne Stupenagel, when she comes too close to exposing dirty secrets of the NYPD?

Followers of Tanenbaum's intelligent, 1970s-set series (Corruption of Blood, etc.) featuring married lawyers Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi will find that the author's punchy style perfectly suits his latest three-ring crime spectacle. After years on New York City payrolls, both attorneys have quit for private work?Karp for a top firm and Marlene, after keeping house for a while, to start a detective agency with her burnt-out ex-cop pal Harry Bello. For his first case, Karp represents Manhattan's Chief Medical Examiner as he sues to get his job back plus damages after he has been fired by the mayor working in tandem with Karp's old nemesis, D.A. Sanford Bloom. Marlene finds her new challenge in the schoolyard where her seven-year-old daughter, Lucy, plays. When a young mother ask Marlene's help in stopping a stalker, Marlene's sleuthing leads her to a Lower East Side women's shelter where Lucy befriends two traumatized children and insists that her mother help them. The plot curve, unsurprisingly to those who know the series, is tossed by regal but ever-difficult journalist Ariadne Stupenagel, Marlene's pushy college buddy, who's digging into the suspicious suicides?while in police custody?of three gypsy cabbies. What she unearths is improbably connected to both Marlene's and Karp's cases. The links among these three very dissimilar narrative threads strains credulity, but Tanenbaum's talent is large, and so are his characters. These assets, along with a shot of genuine compassion for the troubles of children, enable him to just pull this one off. If readers won't quite believe the shockingly unconventional resolution, they'll still be affected by it, leaving them eager to know where this heroic family of crimefighters goes from here.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Butch Karp has left the Manhattan D.A.'s office, but not the legal hot-seat, as this blistering novel of endless Big Apple corruption and coverups makes abundantly clear. Butch's client--a client he's taken on over the howls of his firm's colleagues, who prefer to hold their star litigator over the heads of their own handpicked enemies--is ex-Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Murray Selig, tossed out of office on trumped-up charges so risible that the Mayor and D.A. Sanford Bloom have to have something else in mind--something pretty dire. While Karp is gathering the ammunition to destroy the D.A.'s defense witnesses, his wife, Marlene Ciampi, also on the lam from the D.A.'s office, is fighting off her pushy friend, high-flying reporter Ariadne Stupenagel--busy working on a story on the shakedown of three New York cabbies who fortuitously died in police custody--long enough to set up her own agency serving women who need help enforcing protective legal orders against strangers or sadists or former lovers who are stalking them. Ciampi's highly effective vigilante tactics--heaven help the stalker she gets her teeth into--give Tanenbaum's tale a shot of welcome humor to counterbalance Ciampi's involvement with Isabella and Hector, a pair of wary refugee kids somebody has dumped at tough Mattie Duran's Women's Shelter. Amazingly, Tanenbaum manages to pull all four cases together--Selig's civil suit against the Mayor and the D.A., Stupenagel's investigation of the police shakedown, Ciampi's anti-stalking campaign, and the sorry tale of Isabella and Hector--and even finds a surprising new role for Karp and Ciampi's precocious seven-year-old daughter Lucy. After tossing Karp into the treacherous deeps of the Kennedy assassination (Corruption of Blood, 1995), Tanenbaum proves that his meticulous homework on questions of legal procedure and the best Chinese restaurant for an off-the-record conversation can turn the most preposterous conspiracy of his own into an electrifying page-turner. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Just when it seems that Tanenbaum has written himself into a corner--that he cannot conceivably continue his multivolume narrative of Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi, spouses, attorneys, and "contrarians" in the button-down world of law enforcement--the longtime prosecutor/novelist pulls a rabbit out of his hat. At the end of Corruption of Blood , Butch, Marlene, and daughter Lucy left Washington for New York without immediate employment prospects. Here Bruce has spent over a year as the well-compensated pit bull litigator for a downtown law firm, and Marlene is getting antsy after a year-plus as a full-time mom. Soon Marlene partners with cop Harry Bello in a PI firm, and Karp sues New York City for former Chief Medical Examiner Murray Selig, fired at the urging of Manhattan DA (and Karp/Ciampi nemesis) Sanford Bloom. Tanenbaum draws together subplots involving political and police corruption, domestic violence, and illegal immigration in an involving tale that also illuminates Karp's and Ciampi's romantic and parental challenges. Mary Carroll