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Summary: Rave Review from The Washington Post
Review: Reviewed by Patrick Anderson
Sunday, July 28, 2002; Page BW03 The Washington Post
The veteran crime writer Robert K. Tanenbaum, in Absolute Rage (Atria Books, {$$$}), also provides plenty of thrills, but his is a larger world that includes not only cops and criminals but also children, dogs, marriages, first love, labor unions and even a battalion of aging Viet Cong. The novel is one of a series that stars Butch Karp, a trouble-prone federal prosecutor from New York, but it is not until page 72 that a crime occurs. Until then, we are getting to know Karp and his family as they summer on Long Island. Such leisurely storytelling may demand more patience than some thriller fans possess, but Tanenbaum's deft writing and offbeat characters kept me reading contentedly. Who needs homicide when there's first-rate prose to be had?
Karp is a reasonable sort of fellow and frustrated by political pressures in the prosecutor's office. His more colorful wife, Marlene, is a former lawyer and private investigator who now raises children and dogs, flirts a good bit and keeps her one good eye peeled for trouble (she lost the other one to a letter bomb). Their daughter, Lucy, is a college student, a linguistic prodigy, a devout Catholic and a virgin who finds love as the story unfolds; her brothers, artistic Giancarlo and rough-and-tumble Zak, are 10-year-old twins. When trouble finally interrupts their idyllic summer, it's ugly. A union reformer and his family are killed in a corrupt corner of West Virginia. The governor summons Karp as a special prosecutor, and soon all the Karps are in an alien and dangerous world, confronting corrupt union bosses and malevolent mountaineers, who soon have their eyes on innocent Lucy. All this is not only gripping but richly told. Tanenbaum can evoke young love as persuasively as he does a brawl in a honky-tonk. This is a writer worth knowing.
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Summary: This Year's Winner from Tanenbaum!
Review: Robert Tanenbaum's newest offering in the Butch Karp / Marlene Ciampi series is Absolute Rage, a book that drags the Karps out of New York City and into the lovely and dangerous West Virginia mountains. It's not Tanenbaum's best in the series, but it is a great, rollicking read that will satisfy Karpophiles everywhere.Marlene Ciampi, we learn, has once again given up the gun. She has taken instead to raising and training Neopolitan Mastiffs on a farm on Long Island. Her financial windfall from her previous employment at a high-profile security company affords her the luxury of doing pretty much what she darn well pleases. This pleasant bucolic life comes to an abrupt end when she meets her summer neighbors, the Heeneys, from West Virginia. Husband "Red" Heeney is a union organizer who seeks to unseat the current corrupt union president and return some of the power to West Virginia's poorest and least-empowered workers, the coal miners. Red, despite his noble efforts on the part of exploited workers, is a drinker, a braggart, and a brawler who seems to bring misery to his family. Nevertheless, when Red, his wife Rose, and their youngest child Lizzie are murdered in their West Virginia home, Marlene is moved to help the two remaining Heeney sons find the killers and bring them to justice. Butch Karp finds himself in the middle of West Virginia violence by way of a friend and former professor who persuades Butch to take the job of outside prosecutor in the Heeney murders. The West Virginia governor would like to "clean up Dodge," but he knows that the town's corruption runs deeper than the coal in the mountains and will take an outside force to effect any real change. Karp takes the job to escape a frustrating political situation in the city. In typical fashion, Marlene's approach to rooting out and punishing the killers runs counter to Butch's ingrained belief in the rule of law. Readers who find Lucy Karp, the Karp's young language prodigy, an engaging and interesting character will enjoy her acquisition of a boyfriend. Lucy's insistence that she is too ugly and too peculiar to find love melts away under the attentions of Dan Heeney, Red's youngest son. Lucy discovers that she is quite possibly every bit as alluring as her mother was and still is. As she steps further from childhood, Lucy learns not only about her own heart but that of her lifelong friend Tran. The Vietnamese gangster has long been Lucy's friend and teacher, but she learns, this time out, that despite his outward veneer of civility and humanity, he is a cold killer underneath. The loss of this fiction, combined with the near-loss of brother Zik, shake Lucy's faith in God to its foundation. Lucy's younger brothers, twins Zik and Zak, are also interwoven in this story. Tanenbaum has chosen to flesh out their characters rather than leave them, as he once described them, as "indistinguishable larvae." Zik, the gentle Giancarlo, is an artist and a humorist, while Zak seems destined to join French Legion or perhaps the Green Berets, as his passion is plinking at rats with a small-caliber rifle and blowing stuff up. Tanenbaum seems aware that readers have favorite characters they wish to revisit in each novel, so he has managed to find places for Guma and V.T. Newbury in this venture. Even Murrow, Karp's deadpan assistant and one of the most promising new characters to come along since Harry Bello, makes a small appearance. As a result, the book is contrived, but happily so. It is a visit to familiar territory, a bus trip home, if you will. The reader must suspend belief-nay, the reader must stick her belief to the bedpost and remind herself to retrieve it in the morning-but the overall effect of the book is a tonic for the heart as well as the intellect. Few writers of popular, gobble 'em-down fiction manage to work in Vietnamese folk songs, St. Theresa of Avila, and giant slobbery dogs with as much success as Robert K. Tanenbaum.
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Summary: latest Karp-Ciampi tale
Review: Summer in the city means a lot more than just a loving spoonful of humidity so Butch Karp, his wife Marlene Ciampi, and their twin ten-year-old boys (Zik and Zak), cool off on their Long Island beach property. After completing the spring semester at Boston College, their "eaglette" daughter Lucy joins them on the North Shore. Their neighbor Rose Heeney tells Marlene about her hometown in McCullensburg, West Virginia where family feuds make the Hatfields and McCoys seem like Manhattan debutantes. Not long afterward, Butch and Marlene learn that someone murdered Rose and her husband, Red, a union organizer. The West Virginia governor appoints Butch as a special prosecutor to investigate the Heeney deaths. Butch accompanied by Marlene between canine discussions and their three children travel to West Virginia. However, the quintet will soon find that Manhattan is a safer place than the small coal mining towns of West Virginia, as no family member will come out of this summer unscathed. The latest Karp-Ciampi tale takes long time fans on quite a twist as the action occurs in West Virginia with the kids playing pivotal and dangerous roles and tragedy hitting home. Though humorous, the story line is much darker than the previous novels with the stunning misfortune striking one of them and with Marlene seemingly going crazier as her dogs hold conversations with her and not just letting her know what they want. Still Robert K. Tanenbaum provides a powerful thriller albeit that leaves readers satiated and the Karp-Ciampi crowd ready for their next adventure still filled with ABSOLUTE RAGE. Harriet Klausner
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Summary: Another rave review - The Los Angeles Times
Review: THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - SUNDAY BOOK SECTION - 8/18/02
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL By EUGEN WEBER, Eugen Weber is a contributing writer to Book Review. In the tawdry barrens where would-be thrillers lurk, Robert K. Tanenbaum's novels stand out as oases in a desolate waste: vivid, witty, unflagging and zestful. "Absolute Rage" is one more of the same, and it's a champion. The Majestic Coal Corp. holds Robbens County, W.Va., in thrall. It has the miners union in its pocket along with the mayor, judge, police and assorted mandarins of McCullensburg, the county seat. Then a reforming labor leader, Red Heeney, a bigmouthed Irish upstart, gets murdered for his pains along with his wife and his young daughter. Not an unusual occurrence in those parts, and all would be supine again in the most corrupt county in the state if Rose Heeney had not been a friend of Marlene Ciampi. A semiretired Sicilian desperada, Marlene decides to avenge dead friends. She has long resented cruel, malevolent people getting away with murder all around, has wanted to stop them, has wanted to kill them, has demonstrated that she's good at it. But she can't live that way, now that she's become the mother of three lovely children, all legal offspring of Butch Karp, the chief assistant district attorney for New York County. So she has turned into the good mom of a nicely loony household and a businesswoman who raises, trains and sells large dogs on a Long Island farm. Rose Heeney's death brings Marlene and her slavering mastiff to McCullensburg, where she joins forces with the Heeneys' two surviving sons, dries out a drunken local lawyer and stirs up a barrel full of vicious local snakes. Her husband follows her. Karp is weary of Manhattan deskwork, bored with the genteelly corrupt bureaucracy that keeps him in a safe, respectable, tedious job "supervising the installation of impoverished morons in state penal institutions." He jumps at the invitation of West Virginia's governor to become a special prosecutor and bring justice to a corrupt town. Nor does he disdain underhanded tactics if they help to nail the brutal thugs he faces there. Because Robbens County runs by its own rules and these disdain the ruly, alarms, excursions and slaughter are rife. But neither Butch nor Marlene will triumph by relying on law enforcement. The thugs are impregnable on a mountaintop above a maze of tunnels. They will be terminated with extreme prejudice by the intervention of Marlene's gangster friends, more vicious than the locals and more efficient too. The Heeneys are revenged in spades, though this plays havoc with Butch's ethics and distresses the Karps' daughter who, as a believing Catholic, leaves the extermination of the unrighteous to God. So we leave the family a bit battered but hoping to meet them again soon. The blurb declares Tanenbaum addictive and, for once, the blurb is right.
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Summary: Absolutely fascinating
Review: This is the first Tanenbaum book I have read, and halfway through found myself wishing that the author had written a series with the same main characters. To my delight, I discovered that there are 14 books in the Karp/Cianni series, and tonight I ordered the first 5 - I am looking forward to reading all of them! What fun to discover a "new" author!
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Summary: Lots of Karps, no meat
Review: This time the book focuses solely on the antics of Marlene, Butch, Lucy and the twins, with the main plot being so anemic nobody really cares. However after all this time we are hooked on the Karps, so I personnaly will be back for more next year...
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Summary: A FINELY PACED READING
Review: Voice artist Lee Sellars gives a finely paced reading to the latest thriller from New York times best selling author Robert. K. Tannenbaum. In this, the fourteenth Karp family tale, the big city swelters in summer heat while the Karps are enjoying a leisurely respite at their Long Island farmhouse. Wife Marlene is training guard dogs, while Karp, New York Country's assistant district attorney, is asked to serve as special prosecutor in a West Virginia murder case. Actually, the victims were summer friends of the Karps: a coal mine union leader, his wife, and their daughter. Karp finds more than killing in the little coal mining town - corruption and black crimes abound. Marlene soon joins her spouse, adding fuel to the already glowing fire of imminent death. Daughter Lucy plays a larger than usual part in this story, while the ten-year-old twins provide mostly background. Fans of Tannenbaum will find much to their liking in "Absolute Rage," and, undoubtedly, eagerly await the next one from this prolific author. - Gail Cooke
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Summary: Good read, but you don't know West Virginia, Mr. T!
Review: While a great fan of Butch and Marlene Karp and a dedicated reader of the entire series, I had to smile in amusement at Robert K. Tanenbaum's efforts to portray a West-Virginia mountain locale. Everything is stereotypical, from the dialect, to the reference to hillbillies having one leg longer than the other from walking on the hills, to the effort to capture "local color" by mentioning car tires painted white and used as planters. It is obvious that while Tanenbaum may have made a weekend trip to this area of the country in research for the book that he never set foot into an actual home or spent much time talking to the "yokels." He may like the catfish specials at the local café, but on the whole, he'd be better served by keeping his focus on the Big Apple. The Catholic Church is six blocks away? In a mountain town I doubt that they could count six blocks. They think more in terms of a quarter mile or half mile. Also, when did Bi-Lo start selling combat boots? It's a grocery store. A cardinal rule of writing is to write about what you know -- keep it at home, Mr. Tanenbaum. Don't try to write about the South.
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