Rizzo's War by Lou Manfredo





A different kind of hard-boiled cop story

Joe Rizzo is a detective in NYPD's 62nd Precinct. He is partnered with a young whiz kid newly minted detective and together they solve crimes, talk about crime and we learn how a determined detective can trade favors to skip bureaucratic steps.

Rizzo's War is, in a lot of ways, a non-traditional detective story. Usually, there is an overarching plot (the big crime, in a detective story) and lots of smaller crimes pepper the story as interesting filler. In this book, we get a lot of little crimes to introduce the characters and give the reader the feel for the environment. The actual "big" case doesn't occur until about halfway into the book.

But, that's okay. The characters are interesting. The environment is interesting. The cases are interesting. The book feels like it is an introduction to a series and I hope that it is. I'll look for more Rizzo books.

 I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Rizzo's War by Lou Manfredo.

 Reviewed on August 26, 2009.

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