Review: DEAD EVEN: A River City Crime Anthology (Gray Dog Press October 2010)Author: Frank Zafiro
This short story anthology revolves around the denizens of the mythical River City, Washington. (River City being a stand-in for Spokane.) The collection is divided into sections about various characters the author, Frank Zafiro, has written about in his River City novels.
With his background in law enforcement, Zafiro tends to focus his attention on the officers, detectives and higher-ups within River City's police department. However, his stories also include an exiled New Jersey mobster, a few members of the Russian Mob and other shady characters.
The stories are like a series of vignettes about particularly significant moments in the characters' lives. For instance, the focus in the section about beat officer-turned-detective Katie MacLeod (who Zafiro confesses is his "absolute favorite character") is on the affect the promotion has on her professionally and personally – both for the better and the worse. Some scenes stand out due to their refreshing honesty, like the one where she gets a gag gift from her male co-workers to honor her receiving a detective's shield. In that scene, when MacLeod says, "You guys ... you're such ... assholes," it rings so true and funny. I say this as someone who's an ex-volunteer emergency medical technician, whose been married to a fireman for, well, decades. :)
Zafiro's ability to capture the small details of a cop's life are part of what makes these stories feel so real and give you a truer picture of police work than anything you'll see on CSI. Although some of the descriptive details could be cut back a tad, the overall picture is genuine and will capture you in both heart and mind.
In addition, Zafiro has a flair for creating tragic characters. His depiction of a fateful night in Officer Paul Heiro's life gripped me completely. Zafiro takes you along on a footrace between Heiro and a bad guy – one that left me feeling a bit breathless myself. The psychological stand-off between Heiro and the man he chases is electrifying. Unfortunately, what happens afterward, paves the way for Heiro's decline and fall.
While we get a taste of this in another Paul Heiro story, we never find out exactly how far down he'll go. Zafiro only tells us that "ultimately he will fall further." This knowledge only deepens the sense of tragedy related to this character.
However, not all is doom and gloom in this anthology. The characters include Detectives Finch and Elias – two men who comprise a kind of yin and yang of partners. While Finch is the reserved, "good cop," Elias tends to have more of a "bad cop" attitude. Zafiro uses these characters to show how cops tend to banter and use dark humor to deal with the ugliness and cynicism that comes with investigating crimes of all sorts (ranging, in this book, from a double homicide to the theft of a "bastard mummy" from a museum).
Finally, there's Dominic Bracco (the exiled New Jersey wise guy), who in many ways is the most intriguing character of the bunch. He's been banished to the Great Northwest by his Uncle Angelo for mysterious reasons. Bracco's stories seem to combine all the aspects found in the other tales and bring them to the fore in an entertaining and thought-provoking way. Bracco is not only funny, but he enjoys camaraderie with other hoods (like the local Russian mobsters). However, he has an air of failure and lost opportunity about him. One story in which he matches wits with gypsies is a bit hair-raising and spooky. And suggests that, like Paul Heiro, Bracco may have a less-than-desirable fate awaiting him. This is based in part on a painful decision in another story regarding one of his men.
The stories, in combination, give you just enough to get to know the players. They make up a diverse set of tales about quite different characters dealing with a variety of issues, woven together by location and involvement with the criminal element. As such, the characters occasionally interact with each other. Plus the stories make you want to read more about them in Zafiro's River City novels. Which, I suspect, is part of the point of this collection.
On all those notes, I'd say Zafiro can mark this one: mission accomplished.
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