In the Clear

Rating:
Summary: Insomnia
Review: He always loved the jazzed up feeling when he walked into a casino. This story of the New Jersey seashore is a keeper. Steve Lopez does a good job catching the way local people speak.

In a sense Albert LaRosa grew up in the display window of his father's hardware store. Sheriff Albert LaRosa receives an offer to participate in a casino venture. He tells his long time girl friend who dislikes the proposal. It seems that Sheriff LaRosa sought employment in his old hometown following two years on the Philadelphia police force and a tragic event.

Now the inland island in the vicinity of Atlantic City has three explosions in three nights and the loss of life in one of the incidents constituting murder. Albert expects to leave office in about two weeks, but first he has to solve the mystery of the explosions and other unexplained occurrences. Things reach such a sorry pitch that Albert is faced with the prospect of arresting his own father.

A house is bulldozed to remove it from the path of a road construction project. Albert's friend's diner is slated for removal next. Later he awakes to sounds of gunfire and a fire in his own house. He and a neighbor extinguish the fire.

Albert finds himself engulfed in a crime wave. He tries to identify the perpetrator. Even the FBI is involved. Belatedly he ascertains he needs to protect someone as close to him as a son.

Rating:
Summary: Damaged Hero, weak mystery
Review: Sheriff Albert LaRosa is serving out his time, unable to deal with a family violence case gone terribly wrong, his father's emotional desire to hang onto the family store, or his girlfriend's wish for something different. When developer Oscar Price offers LaRosa a position as head of security in his to-be-built casino, with a huge increase in salary, LaRosa sees it as a way to solve all of his problems. Unfortunately for him, his girlfriend thinks he's sold out and his father quickly becomes suspected of sabotaging the proposed development.

LaRosa turns to drink for a solution but finds this only a partial out. He tries to balance his own desires with those of his family and his girlfriend but cannot reconcile the dramatically different positions.

Author Steve Lopez delivers an intriguingly damaged character in Albert LaRosa. Unfortunately for the novel, none of the other characters possess even a fraction of LaRosa's depth playing out the roles of evil and corrupt developer, heroic shopkeeper, resentful youth, or whatever role Lopez seems to need. As solving the mystery of the bombings becomes secondary to the urge to protect LaRosa's loved ones, even LaRosa begins to lose his appeal.

Lopez writes compellingly about the New Jersey shore, the superficial appeal of Atlantic City, and the corrupting influence of money. For me, at least, the fascinating description of this nasty world did not compensate for unsympathetic characters and superficial mystery.