Red On Red

'Red On Red' is the title of the latest book by Edward Conlon, an active duty NYC detective who seems as at home with words as he might with police procedures. The book was published in April and is his second, after 'Blue Blood' of a few years ago.

'Red On Red' is a novel that is filled with delighfully simple poetic descriptions of people and places in NYC. My thoughts were to start to compile a list by highlighting the really good ones that I come across, but there are so many that I feel I would deface the book for someone else, even though I did buy it for myself.  The book is a looked-forward-to page turner before I reset the 3-way bulb to zero and hit the sheets.  Four hundred plus pages will last me a while 

My surprise is that I haven't read a single book review.  I've yet to come across a passage with a car chase, gunfire, or doughnuts.  And I'm still entertained.  I like to think if the sequence of time were different, Frank McCourt would haul the book into his creative writing class at Stuyvesant High School and show the students what writing can be like. 

Given my own familiarity with NYC, and the fact that the story takes place in NYC, I see everything that is described.  And I'm always sensitive to mistakes, typos, and bad facts, even though it's a novel.  None.  In fact, the book straightened out my confusion over Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and which one involved bread and bridges.  A Catholic cop cleared it up.

Not all books hew so well to facts and descriptions. Someone in the publishing business fairly recently told an attentive room of people that there is no fact checking done in publishing. If a writer wants fact checking, they have to pay for it themselves. 

This does seem like misplaced trust. It makes you wonder about anything Dick Cheney has written.

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