Fury (Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi, Book 17) (A Butch Karp-Marlene Ciampi Thriller)

Bestselling author Robert K. Tanenbaum astonishes readers with Fury, his most explosive book yet in the staggeringly popular Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series. In Brooklyn, a female jogger is brutally raped; the assailants are convicted and later exonerated by the Kings County DA. Now the guilty are filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city of New York, the police, and the two assistant DAs who tried the case. While the cops and the criminal justice system are under media assault and opportunist political demagoguery, Karp has suspicions that there is corruption within his own office. Against a backdrop of Russian mobsters and corrupt lawyers, Butch and Marlene are on a mission to restore the system's lost dignity and bring the rapists to justice. All the while terrorists are at it again, planning to blow the roof off Times Square on New Year's Eve. Alas, the Karp family finds itself in lethal jeopardy, and to survive, they must team up and fight their greatest battle yet. Robert K. Tanenbaum has written a mindboggling thriller involving a web of corruption and courtroom confrontations. Fans of Butch Karp, as well as the classic New York crime drama, will find plenty to sink their teeth into with Fury.

In Brooklyn, a female jogger is brutally raped; the assailants are convicted and later exonerated by the Kings County DA. Now the guilty are filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the city of New York, the police, and the two Brooklyn Assistant DAs who tried the case. Caught in the glare of the media-frenzy, Butch Karp may be blinded to the lethal maneuverings of a terrorist cell plotting to bring the city to its knees by striking Times Square on New Year's Eve. But the destruction begins far below ground, in the subway system — where Karp's family may become their first victims....

Publishers Weekly

At the center of Tanenbaum's scattershot, complicated 17th entry in his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi series (Hoax, etc.) is a decade-old rape perpetrated by four young men beneath the Coney Island Pier. The so-called Coney Island Four were eventually caught and sent to prison, but an oily, race-baiting lawyer, Hugh Louis, has managed to free them and is now filing a $250 million lawsuit against the city of New York. Karp, Manhattan's district attorney, smells corrupt cooperation between Brooklyn's political establishment and the lawyer, and at the request of the mayor, he steps in to defend the city. Though Tanenbaum effectively brings readers inside the world of crime, politics and the law, he bloats the thriller with distracting subplots. In a boilerplate Tanenbaum twist, a terrorist cell led by a brutal Iraqi takes over an abandoned subway tunnel and takes a member of Karp's family hostage as part of its plan to blow up Times Square on New Year's Eve. Meanwhile, Karp's wife, Ciampi, works to exonerate a college professor accused of rape at the same time she pitches in on the Coney Island Four case. It's too bad Tanenbaum has overstuffed his latest thriller: somewhere beneath the layers of fat there's a svelte, snappy story. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Several cases are entwined in this new Butch Karp story: Karp, now acting district attorney, and his family and friends unmask legal, law-enforcement, and moral corruption as they separately and together face a terrorist threat, marshal a defense against four young black men claiming they were wrongly convicted, and review a rape charge brought by a student against her professor. New York District Attorney Butch Karp and his wife, Marlene, find themselves embroiled in corruption when they set out to bring a group of Brooklyn rapists to justice HUGH LOUIS SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY IN THE chair next to the desk of the television talk-show host.