Ira Berkowitz Family Matters

Family Matters

Ira Berkowitz

Justin Charles, May 2006, $24.95, 264 pp.

ISBN: 1932112448

Jackson Steeg is trying to pull himself out of the abyss by staying sober, but struggles with the suspension he received for punching out a fellow police officer. He has no friends to turn to but he cares enough to watch over a homeless person who is an expert on poetry and takes in a young girl because her father just went to jail.

One night Jackson wakes up to the sound of police in the apartment below his; he goes downstairs to see what is going on. A dead woman has been found in the apartment of Graham Moore, who is later also found murdered with a bullet in his head. The female victim Diana Strickland comes from a prominent family and in what is a startling coincidence Steeg's father investigated the death of her mother twenty years ago. Deciding to investigate to pass time, Steeg stirs up skeletons that powerful people want left interred.

In his debut crime thriller Ira Berkowitz gives the reader a tour of the underbelly of New York's Hell's Kitchen using racketeers, pimps, drug users and sellers, and crime lords to juxtapose with the antihero Steeg. He is a flawed person who loses it at times, but in the end tries to do what he believes is the right thing. This dark urban police procedural borders into Noir territory with its lone cowboy cop. This is a superb work by an author who has oodles of talent.

Harriet Klausner