The Tin Collectors

Rating:
Summary: Not Your Average Desperate Cop
Review: i found this book on my bookshelf and read the back with prejudge disinterest. half the books i own, and there's a lot, were given to me by someone who was moving and didnt want the extra baggage. THE TIN COLLECTORS was one among many other cop novels, mysteries, and historical war novels.

from page one i was hooked.

Although it doesnt read in first person, i got a sense of a well-developed character almost as though i knew the guy. the quick-paced plot, love-to-hate/hate-to-love characters, the twist and turns, and my favorite: the internal cop-corruption made me glad this was just the beginning of a SHANE SCULLY series.

THE VIKING FUNERAL sits half-read on my desk now.

Rating:
Summary: Cannell at his Best! Highly recommended.
Review: I rarely read cop stories but I bought this because the title intrigued me. (It refers to the LAPD's Internal Affairs prosecutors who take a cop's badge when he/she is found guilty of wrongdoing.) I'm glad for my curiosity because I thoroughly enjoyed TIN COLLECTORS--especially the macho "cop speak" dialogue from the men AND the women!

Officer Shane Skully kills a fellow policman in self defense and as he tries to exonerate himself, he gets drawn deepr into high-level intrigue within the Los Angeles Police Department. But what made TIN COLLECTORS more than just another hard-boiled cop story, and why I recommend it, is that Shane has a more important role than cop. He acts as a surrogate father to a juvenile deliquent teenager named Chooch and in the process of helping the boy, Shane uncovers things about his past that makes him whole. This subplot made the story more real and made me root for Shane and Chooch and want to see how their lives turned out.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Police Thriller!
Review: If you only read one book in the Shane Scully series, this book should be it! It offers a storyline unlike the same-old, same-old cop stories one gets used to.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing. Pure genius once again!
Review: In The Tin Collectors, Stephen Cannell offers the first in a new series that is also very much a police procedural. With 5 successful prior novels, Cannell is still best known for writing/producing such television hits as the Rockford Files, Baretta, The A-Team, Renegade, Silk Stalkings and many others.

Officer Shane Scully gets a frantic call from the wife of his ex-partner Ray 'Steeltooth' Molar. Molar is beating her. Again. ("You don't get the name 'Steeltooth' just because your last name's Molar") In self-defense, Scully is forced to kill the abusive husband. The killing of the popular, virtually legendary cop brings Scully more grief than he ever imagined. Put in charge of Scully's Internal Affairs prosecution is Alexa Hamilton, the department's "number one tin collector." When he is accused directly by the Chief of Police of taking files from Molar's house and threatened with facing a murder charge if the material is not returned, Scully is convinced he's being set up.

Scully begins his own investigation and soon uncovers evidence of corruption in high places. Hamilton is the only one he can turn to who just might believe him.

Some glib prime-time dialog does seep in. (When Scully's house is hit in a drive by shooting he says, "I got enough lead in the walls to go into strip mining.") Cannell keeps the tension and pace at high levels so a bit of cliché doesn't really detract. There is no mistaking Cannell's mastery of story telling. The same sense of character and dialog that have made his television shows hits, guides him here. The Tin Collectors is a sure winner.

Rating:
Summary: As a Latino I feel disrespected by Mr Cannel
Review: Prostitutes, gangsters, junkies, hanging judges, monstrous people who forgot their roots and don't speak Spanish at all, reeking waiters, valets. That's the kind of character Mr. Cannel bestows upon us. The Spanish language itself is never "spoken", but "chattered".
I admit that the qualification of 1 star is unfair because there is an element of dynamism and talent in Cannel novels, when you get to see through his own prejudices and mass-market pen. I also always enjoy his slangy English, from an anthropological point of view.

Rating:
Summary: One annoying character, one star lost
Review: Reading this review will give away some of the ending, so please turn your eyes away from this review now if that matters to you.

I was at first disappointed by the novel because I was expecting Internal Affairs (IA) to be more hard-charging and come up with more characters to loathe, especially since the only character I truly hated was Chooch, the obnoxious teen left in the care of Shane Scully's (the main character's) care by his prostitute mother.

Surprisingly, the lack of overbearing IA behavior, which I expected and actually wanted, wasn't the downside I thought it might me. In fact, the only downside to this otherwise excellent novel was that Chooch wasn't killed. Of course, the revelation that Chooch is Shane's son makes for an interesting lead-in for future novels in the Scully series, but Chooch was such an obnoxious jerk that I'd have been willing to settle for a bitter and rogue Scully for as long as the series lasted.

Whether Chooch's survival pleases or annoys you, this is a top-notch book written by a real pro. I'll be reading the rest of the series.

Rating:
Summary: Mindless fun
Review: Shane Scully received an emergency call from his ex-partner's wife saying that her husband is trying to kill her. Shane comes and shoots his former partner, Molars, dead in a clear case of self-defense. Unfortunately, Molars buddies do not see it that way and they will go beyond the call of duty to make Scully's life a living hell.

This is one of those books that if the bad guys had left well enough alone there would not be a novel. In this case, there is an extensive Internal Affairs investigation to bring Scully down. Shane's hand is forced and he investigates his former partner. He uncovers a conspiracy in the LAPD as well as the mayor's office.

If you do not try to look for logic in the story you might enjoy it. This book is pure escapist fiction where anything can happen. Lot of action, lot of chases and lot of double crossing. I liked this book, but I preferred KING CON.

Rating:
Summary: Cannell's a way better screenwriter than novelist
Review: This story gets way too much into police procedures and jargon, and the timelines and details are all screwed up. LAPD Sgt. Shane Scully kills his ex-partner Ray "Steel Tooth" Molar, a super sleaze who is canonized by his fellow cops. Molar was beating his wife, who is also Shane's ex-girlfriend, with a billy club when Shane intervened. There's a "Johnny Dangerously" play ball scene in the Chief's office as a highly political, corrupt process is about to steamroll the befudled Shane.

Ex-cop Demarco Saint, now a tattooed, pony tailed, earring wearing, beer guzzling old pedophile living in a shack in Santa Monica, reappears to defend Shane. Sheets, and ex-cop as bad as Molar is head of security for a mega bucks developer who's running hooker parties and blackmailing the Long Beach City Council to turn over the old Navy Yard to his company.

Everyone from the Mayor through the Deputy Chief seems to be railroading Shane. His house is machine-gunned and he's kidnapped by helicopter form a movie shoot. Impetuous and vulnerable, the character has potential, but the endless chapters of impossible situations, each chapter titled in a phrase of cop jargon, make this a comic book. That holds true right to the end where after some pretty good shoot 'em up stuff, Alexa and Shane go from Bonnie and Clyde to national heroes.

I'll pass on his new one.

Rating:
Summary: A few holes don't slow the pace
Review: Veteran TV writer and novelist, Stephen J. Cannell ("King Con," "The Devil's Workshop") builds his latest thriller around a brutal, far-reaching police conspiracy.

LAPD detective Shane Scully, awakened by his ex-partner's hysterical wife, races over to save her from a savage beating and ends up shooting her husband in self-defense. Though the husband is known for his brutality, he is also something of a hero in department circles. An IAD inquiry which should be open-and-shut turns into a prosecutorial vendetta, complete with Scully's longtime nemesis, ice-queen and ace prosecutor Alexa Hamilton (mid to late-thirties, Alexa must have been amazingly young when she prosecuted Scully 17 years earlier - just one of the novel's noticeable, if minor, holes).

Threats escalate to violence as Scully attempts to save himself by doing his own digging. Each unsavory secret he uncovers leads to another, encompassing bigger and bigger fish, ultimately threatening the life of a troubled, angry teen entrusted to Scully's care by his mother, a high-level call girl and police informant.

Cannell's writing is slick and easy, his protagonists deep enough to like and his villains more brutish and greedy than clever. He exposes the threads of conspiracy at a pace designed to keep the pages turning, building to an all-stops-pulled climax which manages to involve air, land and sea (okay it's a lake but why quibble?).

Like most conspiracies I found this one hard to swallow but the novel is great entertainment and, I must admit, I've read stranger stories of fact.