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Searching... Dallas Public Library | FICTION - CANNELL | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Cannell, S. 2004 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A nightmarish series of events sweeps LAPD's Sergeant Shane Scully and his wife (and boss), Alexa, into the vortex of an enormous, jurisdictional firestorm.
First, a sheriff's deputy, a friend of Shane's, is gunned down while serving a routine search warrant. His fellow deputies blame the incident on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom they angrily accuse of having failed to warn them that the suspect had a huge arsenal of illegal weapons in his house.
Soon thereafter, a member of the ATF Situation Response Team is shot to death, followed by the sniper murder of the Sheriff's Special Enforcement Bureau. At the request of the Mayor, LAPD, as an uninvolved and unbiased agency, assigns Shane Scully to investigate.
He is given an impossible deadline to find a solution before these two elite and deadly SWAT Teams kill each other off amid a hurricane of horrible publicity. Shane pursues his investigation in a direction that neither his chief nor his wife agrees with, and succeeds in putting himself, his loved ones, and his career in terrible jeopardy before he finally discovers the shocking and deadly truth.
Author Notes
Stephen J. Cannell was born in Los Angeles, California on February 5, 1941. He was dyslexic and struggled through school. After graduating from the University of Oregon, he drove a truck for his father's home-decorating business and wrote TV scripts at night and on the weekends. His first writing successes were story ideas sold to Mission Impossible. Four years later, he sold a script for It Takes a Thief. In 1966 a script he submitted for Adam 12 so impressed the producers at Universal that they offered him the position of head writer. At Universal he wrote and helped create several TV shows including The Rockford Files, Baretta, and Baa Baa Black Sheep.
He started his own production company in 1979, generating The A-Team, Riptide, Hunter, and 21 Jump Street. Other credits include Wiseguy, Renegade, and Silk Stalkings. He has scripted over 1,500 TV episodes and created or co-created over 40 programs.
His first novel, The Plan, was published in 1995. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 15 novels including Final Victim, King Con, and the Shane Scully series. He died of complications associated with melanoma on September 30, 2010 at the age of 69.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The title of the latest entry in Cannell's Shane Scully LAPD series (Hollywood Tough; The Tin Collectors; The Viking Funeral) is police jargon for any doorway, which is where cops are most vulnerable when clearing a house. As the novel begins, Shane stumbles into a full-scale barricade shootout between gunman Vincent Smiley and surrounding police. After one of two competing SWAT teams at the scene burns down the barricaded house with Smiley in it, a fight over who is to blame begins to smolder. Several subsequent cop shootings (with all victims caught in the aforementioned vertical coffins) fan the SWAT team turf tussle into a conflagration that Shane and wife Alexa, the acting head of the LAPD Detective Services Group, are assigned to investigate. Shane, an old school detective, insists on starting from zero and looking into shooter Smiley's past. Everyone else wants him to forget the gumshoe routine and come up with an instant solution. The pleasure of Cannell's work isn't in the writing ("Bullets whined and ricocheted in a deadly concert of tortured metal"), but lies more often in the interesting procedural elements ("It's very hard to protect a crime scene, so I always start at the far edges first, and work in toward the body"). Shane's still a little rough around the edges, but despite too many pop psychology musings, he's a dependable and satisfying character. Readers will enjoy watching him puzzle out the twists and turns of the plot and watch breathlessly as he undertakes a climactic high-speed chase in a souped-up dune buggy on a military shooting range. (Jan.) Forecast: It's no surprise that Cannell's novels have a cinematic bent as he's the creator or co-creator of 38 television shows and author of more than 350 scripts for these shows. Solid publisher backing and a built-in fan base should push this one onto some bestseller lists. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Internecine warfare between feebies and sheriff's guys with the LAPD as peacemakers--could you believe--in this rousing bang-banger. Emo Rojas, sheriff's deputy, is gunned down by a trigger-happy sociopath named Vincent Smiley, who is subsequently gunned down by the cops. There's an aspect to this that enrages Rojas's colleagues. Evidence suggests that an AFT team callously let the deputy stumble into a trap. Later, an AFT agent is murdered, and the feds are convinced they're looking at payback. A powder-keg situation if ever there was one: law-enforcement folks drawing down on each other instead of the creeps, with the LA media having a field day. Powder-keg foretells a command performance by series hero Sergeant Shane Scully (Hollywood Tough, 2003, etc.). Charged by the mayor, the police chief, and by his lieutenant wife Alexa--acting head of the Detective Services Group--with peacekeeping through lickety-split case-cracking, Shane upsets one and all with a seemingly tangential approach. Sort out the feds and the deputies, never mind the sociopath, the brass insists. But Shane senses that short cuts are illusory here, that the only way to restore order to potential chaos is to cut to the why. Suicide-by-cop: a deliberate attempt to have the police do for him what he lacked the courage to do? That's the way conventional wisdom sees Smiley's demise. Too easy, thinks Shane. Sick, yes. Filled to the brim with self-loathing, that as well. But Vincent Smiley was much too bent on his own special brand of vengeance to be suicidal, Shane feels, and of course he's right, though by the time the smoke clears--and the cost is counted--he wishes he hadn't been. Action's been a reliable staple in the Scully series, but here Cannell gets the people right, too. A likable, believable cast makes this the best yet by the Rockford man. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The firefight played out like a mini-Waco conflagration. Vincent Smiley, a wanna-be cop with a fondness for bragging about his weapons cache, battles elements of the Los Angeles Police and County Sheriff's Departments until a SWAT team brings in the heavy weaponry, and Smiley's home burns to the ground with Smiley apparently in it, firing until the end. The incident takes on political repercussions when it's learned that the battle erupted as Smiley was served with a misdemeanor weapons warrant by an LAPD patrolman. An intradepartmental squabble ensues when the LAPD learns a division of the Feds was aware of Smiley's violent proclivities and may have sacrificed one of their patrol officers to serve a warrant and force Smiley's hand. Shane Scully, an LAPD homicide investigator and his wife, Alexa, an LAPD Division commander, are handed the political hot potato of sorting out the who-knew-what-when mess. Rapid deterioration sets in when two officers involved in the case are shot dead by a sniper. Are law-enforcement agencies at war? Cannell, a veteran TV producer of such hits as The Rockford Files, has made the transition to crime fiction easily; this is his fourth Scully novel along with several stand-alone thrillers. The Scully series, though, brings out the best in him: adept characterization, sharp dialogue, breakneck plotting, and great entertainment value. --Wes Lukowsky Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Cannell's fictional LAPD cop, Shane Scully, is one tough S.O.B. In this latest outing, he finds himself in the middle of a law enforcement territorial war when he begins to investigate the murder of one of his friends from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. It seems as if both the sheriff and the feds arrived at the scene of the crime even though neither of their communications systems were compatible with the LAPD frequency. Shane is teamed with a female sheriff, and together they find themselves without friends in any law enforcement agencies. Scott Brick is brilliant at capturing the authentic language that the author brings to his works; Cannell is, quite simply, one of the best police procedural writers today. This will definitely be a popular item in all audio collections.-Joseph L. Carlson, Allan Hancock Coll., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.