Book 9 Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum 4.00 · 927 Ratings · 43 Reviews · published 1997 · 16 editions
Butch Karp, chief of the Manhattan District Attorney's Homicide Bureau, and his private detective wife, Marlene Ciampi, find themselves the center of publicity when their two latest cases collide in a racially charged murder trial. Reprint.


Book 10 Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum 4.01 · 1,201 Ratings · 42 Reviews · published 1998 · 7 editions
Deputy D.A. Butch Karp knows why people kill. For revenge ... profit ... survival ... pleasure. But for some, murder is beyond reason ...

An elderly shopkeeper is found brutally slain in Manhattan.

An undercover cop is shot to death while off duty.

A third victim is spotted floating in the Hudson River, his skull pumped with five .22 caliber slugs.

Three crimes linked by a single cryptic message. Three crimes that will plunge an entire city into an explosive urban nightmare. Three crimes whose far-reaching consequences will touch Butch Karp and his family in the most intimate, unexpected, and terrifying ways imaginable.


Book 11 Act of Revenge by Robert K. Tanenbaum 4.02 · 786 Ratings · 35 Reviews · published 1999 · 21 editions
"The most interesting pair of characters in the suspense genre" (Chicago Tribune), chief assistant district attorney Butch Karp and his wife, private security consultant Marlene Ciampi, are caught in the deadliest cross fire of their careers- an escalating war between New York's Mafia crime syndicate and war between New York's Mafia crime syndicate and its lethally powerful Chinese gang. This time, though, the stakes have never been higher or more dangerous - for their vivacious twelve-year-old daughter is the target.


Book 12 True Justice by Robert K. Tanenbaum 4.04 · 1,064 Ratings · 44 Reviews · published 1999 · 20 editions
District Attorney Butch Karp and his pistol-packing wife Marlene Ciampi, the liveliest crime-fighting couple in New York, are back in True Justice. The first set of infanticides happen on Butch's watch: a wave of gruesome incidents in which newborns are killed or abandoned by their indigent teenage mothers. The second, Marlene's case, is straight out of the headlines: a middle-class college girl and her boyfriend are indicted for first-degree murder in the death of their baby after a concealed pregnancy.

The most interesting story belongs to Lucy, Butch and Marlene's teenage daughter, an incisively brilliant and complex young woman who deserves her own novel. Lucy's best friend's parents seem to have been murdered by an African furniture restorer of whose guilt Lucy is unconvinced. The real solution to the mystery of who killed the Maxwells is telegraphed well in advance, but all the crimes give Butch, Marlene, their colleagues in criminal justice, and even Lucy a chance to weigh in on the law's fault lines and the ironies implicit in what passes for justice in America. But it's Lucy's spiritual quest that provokes the book's most unusual and involving drama. Lucy's devout Catholic faith, like her prodigious talent for language (she can speak 14, but give her five days in a foreign country and that'll be 15, thank you), is a mystery to Butch, a lapsed Jew, and Marlene, who has trouble squaring her own faith with the violence that attends her job. When a Jesuit priest tries to explain it in the following passage, Butch is nonplused:

   "Lucy takes her spiritual responsibilities very seriously. And of course, in the current age, when people think there's no such thing as spiritual responsibility, she has nothing to compare herself to, and so she may get herself painted into a corner."

   "I'm not sure I follow," said Karp.

   "Oh, I mean, two or three hundred years ago, a girl with her talents and predilections would have been in an order, with hourly guidance and a rule to follow. Think of Mickey Mantle being born in, say, Romania in 1830. The talent's there, but there's no cultural space for it."

This is a keenly intelligent book, many cuts above the usual courtroom procedural. The most interesting things happen outside the courtroom--the moral dilemmas, the political choices, the bonds between parents and daughter. The pacing is as swift as the dialogue, the characters are piercingly illuminated, and the philosophical jousting is worth a room full of Jesuits. This reader is heading straight for Tanenbaum's backlist and eagerly anticipating another novel with Lucy as the star. --Jane Adams