Robert K. Tanenbaum Fury

Fury

Robert K. Tanenbaum

Atria, Sep 2005, $25.95, 396 pp.

ISBN: 0743452909

Twelve years ago five Bedford Stuyvesant teenage gangbangers were convicted of raping twenty-eight years old new mother Liz Tyler when they caught her jogging from Brighton beach towards Coney Island; they left her dead under a pier. After a decade behind bars for four of them, the one who turned witness had died; Enrique Villalobos, a lifer at Rikers Island, confessed to the crime as the lone assailant; Kings County DA Kristine Brennan admits that the only DNA found at the crime scene besides the victim matched that of Enrique. Politically ambitious attorney Hugh Louis demands the immediate release from prison of the Coney Island Four and persuades the oldest Jayshon Sykes to sue the city for $250 million.

Since Brennan capitulated, Mayor-elect Denton demands New York's Acting District Attorney Butch Karp to defend the city. Meanwhile, Butch's wife Marlene Ciampi, defends visiting Russian Professor Alexis Michalik from the rape charge of NYU graduate student Sarah Ryder. While the married couple struggles with highly visible cases, they hear rumors that murderer David Grale, thought dead, is alive, and that terrorists plan to blow up Times Square at midnight on New Year's Eve.

The seventeenth Karp-Ciampi legal thriller is terrific when the storyline focuses on the two rape cases; on the other hand the terrorists and Grale subplots seem cartoonish and unnecessary in comparison. The lead duet remains as fresh and solid as ever as they work difficult cases under the media spotlight and the heated political reactions to the negative publicity of being on the accused side of both fights. Though the ending is obvious, fans of the series will cherish this installment and look forward to the next one, already set up.

Harriet Klausner