Sorry I was not able to read you book but it went to archive before I could get to it. Sorry once again.

Rating 2/5

Thanks to Netgalley and The Wild Rose press for the galley.

The premise was engaging and immediately intriguing — a small town beat cop butts heads with a  vicious Chicago mobster, in the backdrop of the repeal of the prohibition.

There really isn’t must more than that to the story, which put an immense burden on the writer’s technique to engage the reader through the book’s relatively short length of 189 pages.  As it turns out, H.B. Berlow doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.

A part of the blame, perhaps, can be placed on the all-too-short length but then again, as I have observed, there really isn’t too much meat to the story.

In a nutshell, our protagonist is Baron Witherspoon, a patrolman in Arkansas City. Dangerous Chicago mobster “Crazy Jake” Hickey and his girlfriend are on the run from the mob war raging across theWindy City, and so come to Ark City to lay low.

There are few characters in the story, only caricatures.

That’s pretty much it. Hickey manages to get his hands dirty in the local organized crime and sets himself on collision course with our hero.

Now, the style of prose is frustratingly illogical and infuriatingly inconsistent. For such a badass mobster, who, through several POV chapters, sings no end of his own praise, Hickey is little more than a petulant child who has little control over his temper. It doesn’t take much to trigger his insecurities or his anger. If done well, this could have been compelling, but the sudden and wild mood swings fail to convince.

Then we come to the other problematic character, Baron Witherspoon. Having fought in the Great War, Witherspoon still suffers, understandably, from PTSD. But that doesn’t explain the contempt he seems to have those who were either too young, too old, or the wrong gender to have fought in the war. All too often, Witherspoon lapses into a tortured monologue implying he alone knows how bad life can get as he fought in a war. His frequent lapses into self-pity are irritating and his character treatment too is inconsistent.

On the one hand, he claims to have no ambition (and by extension, skill) to be anything more than a beat cop and yet, has no problem chasing down leads and causing trouble to the bad guys. In fact, the police chief seems to invest an awful lot of faith in his sleuthing skills. Our hero seems supernaturally gifted at this, seeing as how he can tell whether or not someone is dangerous, wicked, shady or anything else, for that matter, through a mere glance. Lazy writing at its best.

It appears the writer plotted it out all too well in his head, but either had no space or forgot to flesh out the story.

Speaking of which, it could have been the book’s one redeeming factor but, as I have mentioned earlier, there isn’t much to the story.

A disappointing effort.