A brilliantly engaging and entertaining story about small city policing and politics. The city of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania is under severe financial pressure and police chief Maro Balzac must make some police officers redundant. Finding this a line he cannot cross given the depleted state of the police department Balzac refuses. This confrontation along with encountering a SWAT style group operating in Rocksburg who are very reluctant to recognise his authority start Balzac’s encounter with the true shape and depth od politics in his city.
The central mystery in this story is not directly criminal, it follows Balzac’s slow realisation that he had not been paying attention when he should. A disclination, hardening into a refusal, to engage with the politics of the town lead Balzac to finding himself in an untenable position.
The reveals are brilliantly staged, and the depth of the willful blindness adopted by Balzac becomes clearer and clearer. The inevitable conclusion is astoundingly turned into something unexpected, utterly credible, and heartfelt.
That moment captures one of the extraordinary aspects to the story, the impact and importance of policing in a community. The new, heavily armed force approaches law enforcement as a military operation, the deployment of force against hostile adversaries. Balzac favours talking and using knowledge of the people involved to resolve the situation.
The other vital aspect to this story is that it is nearly all people talking. K.C. Constatine , along with the extraordinary G.V. Higgins, writes dialogue that is a character in itself. The cast all talk a lot, they talk in circular ways, using a rich language that pulls the reader deep into the conversations and the story. The use of dialogue never slows or drags at the story, it moves it forward in unexpected ways, it gives weight to reveals and gives depth and context to the cast and the context.
K.C. Constantine has delivered a story with battered fallible heroes and self-centred villains whose greed is bottomless and spins the meaning of winning and loosing in a astonishing way. Gripping, thoughtful and razor sharp, this is first rate writing, a deep pleasure to read.
