Hose Monkey

Mid February 2004 finds Long Island, New York cold and dreary. So too is the life of former NYPD Detective Joe Serpe. His life is a wreckage of shattered dreams and hopes. His fifteen year marriage has collapsed with no hope of reconciliation. His former partner committed suicide during a police corruption investigation that took both of their jobs and ended any chance of having a career in law enforcement. Then, there is his brother, Vinny, a firefighter who died running for his life as Tower One fell. Vinny had been the only one to stand by him while his life crumbled and it was Vinny who took him into his home where he had no other place to go but the streets. Vinny's home became Joe Serpe's with Vinny's death and his voice still plays daily on the outgoing message on the phone answering machine. Joe Serpe's existence has shrunk down to living as a ghost of his former self while he delivers home heating oil by day and drinks Vodka heavily each night. Also dealing with loss is Bob Healy who lost his wife Mary to pancreatic cancer. His period of loss has been shorter, only six months, but it is just as painfully deep. He's trying to adjust, not only to her loss, but to doing all the things she used to routinely take care of which includes getting the heating oil delivered. He also was the lead Internal Affairs Detective on Serpe's case. By coincidence or stroke of luck, Joe Serpe ends up making a delivery to Healy's home. That visit rekindles bitterness between the two men as well as long unfinished business. At almost the same time a mentally handicapped coworker of Joe's is killed. The local police figure it to be the work of gangs. Joe disagrees and before long Joe Serpe and Bob Healy are in contact and soon grudgingly working together to find justice for the dead while trying to bury their burdens from the past. You may not have heard of Tony Spinosa. If you have heard of Reed Farrel Coleman the author who has a slew of awards for his Moe Prager series ("Walking The Perfect Square" and others) then you will be interested in his pseudonym Tony Spinosa. This book is a far different book than the Moe Prager series though familiar themes are again present here. Grittier in all aspects, this first novel in the Joe Serpe series features tough language, graphic violence and a man at the proverbial end of the line in many ways. Joe is just going through the motions of a bare existence that is empathetically painful for the reader. His depression and anger at the world fueled nightly by Vodka figuratively drips off of the pages in the first half of the book. Guilt is a powerful motivator and Joe has plenty to feel guilty about. Love is a powerful motivator as well and that works on Joe almost as well as the guilt does. Once Joe begins to come alive as a human being again along with being an investigator, he becomes a threat to others. Readers quickly learn just how good a cop Joe was back in the day. Written in a third person tough guy style

Reed Farrel Coleman wrote one of the best crime novels of the past few years, "The James Deans," which was nominated for virtually every mystery award there is, and won quite a few of them. Now Coleman is wearing a slightly different hat: that of a man called Tony Spinosa. Regardless of what name he's using, though, you know that Coleman/Spinosa is going to produce quality, literate fiction that probes the depths of the human soul in the form of an outstanding mystery plot. "Hose Monkey," his latest, is no exception. Joe Serpe was an NYPD detective, an honest copy, but one who covered too often for those who were less than pure, especially his drug-involved partner. Serpe lost his job with the PD, then tragically he lost his brother, a hero fireman who died on 9/11. After that, Serpe lost most of his reasons for trying, and now he just muddles through life, existing from day to day, but not really caring. He can't even bring himself to remove his brother's voice from his answering machine. That starts to change, however, when a mentally retarded young man whom Serpe works with -- he's a fuel oil deliveryman, hence the book's title -- is murdered, and Serpe blames himself. He decides to investigate the murder, and finds an unlikely ally in the form of a retired Internal Affairs detective -- the very same cop who ran Serpe off the force several years before. The plot of "Hose Monkey" is violent and suspenseful, but at its heart it is a quieter story, both sad and touching, and exquisitely written. Coleman has the ability to create characters who feel much realer than those we usually encounter in mystery stories, and as a result, their lives and their plights are much more moving. We care about them, because he has made them matter to us. It is that aspect of Coleman's work (and now Spinosa's) that makes it rise to the top. Despite his excellence as a crime novelist, deep down Coleman is still a poet, and his work sings with a love of language and a keen understanding of the human psyche. He is a true credit to our genre, one of the finest writers we have.