Bait, Advance Reading Copy, First Edition, New

After killing mobster Johnny D'Angelo's only son in a drunk-driving accident, narcotics detective Jack Walsh finds himself stripped of his badge and on the run, all the while trying to solve the murder of his partner. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.

Abel's brisk, sparely written thriller reads more like an accomplished 10th novel than a debut. Jack Walsh, a cop who has been hitting the bottle since his partner died in an aborted drug bust, wakes up in a Boston hospital after an automobile accident to learn that the other car's driver--the only son of local crime boss Johnny D'Angelo--is dead, which means Walsh is as good as dead himself. After resigning from the force and serving time in a state medical facility, Walsh holes up in his hometown, Athol, Mass., to wait for the Mafia hit he knows is coming. Unknown to Walsh, the DA's office has him under surveillance; they're using him for bait, hoping to get evidence against D'Angelo when the mobster comes gunning for him. So begins a cat-and-mouse game that involves Walsh's family and neighbors, D'Angelo's future son-in-law and the DA's office. Walsh has very little chance of surviving unless he can get someone to listen to his suspicions about a crooked cop who might be responsible for the death of his partner. Abel skillfully makes several potentially cliched characters quite believable, and delivers his complicated plot with the simplicity of screenplay stage directions. Unlike many first novels, this one is delightfully free of authorial excess.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

First-novelist Abel makes a stunningly impressive debut with a twisty, existential tale of crime and punishment. A problem drinker since his partner was gunned down in a drug- bust ambush, former Boston narcotics-squad detective Jack Walsh soon runs into big trouble. Having done time himself for vehicular homicide after a smashup that killed the son of local Godfather Johnny D'Angelo and left him with a game leg, Walsh has gone to ground in rural Massachusetts where his button-down brother owns a hardware store. Walsh can run, but he can't hide from vengeful Mafia hit men, an estranged wife's lawyers, and assorted others who want a piece of his battered ass. Their ranks encompass Kate Haggerty, an ambitious US Attorney eager to use him as bait to snare D'Angelo. Walsh, who has his own agenda (which includes bringing to book a crooked lieutenant under whom he once served), agrees to cooperate with the feds. Before the ex-cop can set himself as a cat among the pigeons, however, he must survive incompetent attempts on his life by some of the mob's looser cannons (who mistakenly waste several innocent bystanders) and evade the surveillance of government agents. In a climactic sequence that takes place in a chilling urban Gehenna, Walsh salvages a measure of his lost honor, while friends and foes get approximately what's coming to them. Abel's flair for dead-on dialogue and a keen eye for the grim hilarities, as well as realities, of law enforcement promise to have enthusiastic critics likening him to Lawrence Block, George Higgins, Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, and other masters of the hard-case trades. He won't suffer by such comparisons--Abel has his own voice, one that's bleak, brutal, and distinctively brilliant. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Abel's first novel's just a warm-up for an action screenplay. It's got plenty of dialogue, movement, cop jargon, and it's even got a self-conscious homage to cop-flick king Bruce Willis. Picture it: brooding loner-antihero-cop Jack Walsh (Willis) is drunk sometimes, so he accidentally drives into the son of Johnny D'Angelo, capo of the Boston mob (Harvey Keitel?). Once exonerated, he takes refuge in a rural house. While he's there, the comic relief, D'Angelo's future son-in-law and buddy (any brat-packer), goofs up an easy hit on him. Meanwhile, incredibly crooked cop Tony Keenan (Gary Busey? Fred Ward?) makes love to Jack's wife and plays police and Mob off against each other. The district attorneys--beautiful Kate Haggerty (some not-too-pricey starlet), for instance--want Walsh to wear a wire and act as bait to trap D'Angelo into self-incrimination. But D'Angelo, aching to be Michael Corleone and go legit, is enigmatic. Bait's entertaining, but it has too many characters and tries too hard to imitate the movies. Joe Collins

The best way to describe this debut novel is dark . Detective Jack Walsh thinks that his life has hit rock-bottom the night his partner is shot, but the incident only presages hard times to come. In response to his partner's death, Walsh begins to drink, and that's when his real problems begin--he kills the son of a mob boss in a car accident. Walsh finds himself under suspicion from the bereaved father's organization and the police department at the same time. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Walsh finds that his only escape is to stick his neck out even further (becoming bait) by agreeing to serve as a kind of informant on the underworld that is trying to kill him. Despite the novel's grim story line and gritty writing style, Abel does not overdo the violence. Recommended for public libraries where crime novels are popular.
- Jim Cunningham, Illinois Mathematics & Science Acad., Aurora
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.