Without Fear or Favor

Robert K. Tanenbaum is a prolific author who has never been reviewed in this blog – 32 books in print, and Without Fear or Favor is the 29^th in a series about Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi. Really, and we’ve not known about him?

This is a most timely, well-written, and important story about racism and perceptions of racism in police departments and by civilians. Karp is the District Attorney of New York City. Ciampi is Karp’s wife, also an attorney who only plays a minor role in this book. This story has to do with the figures behind the scenes in the police shooting of a young black man who was reportedly unarmed. From the beginning, the reader knows that the black kid, Ricky Watts, was armed and he had fired first in an attempt to assassinate a cop, Officer Bryce Kim. However, Ricky had been set up by a sociopath, Anthony Johnson, who went by the title “Nat X,” a mishmash of names in memory of Malcolm X and Nathaniel Turner. It was Ricky who died when he missed Officer Kim who did not miss when he returned fire. It was Nat X who grabbed the gun from Ricky’s body and then blamed the police department of killing another unarmed black man.

Nat X saw himself as a revolutionary who would lead his people to justice in a separate state from the inherent injustice of the white man. It was Nat X who assassinated white Officer Tony Cippio as he was finishing a pickup basketball game in Harlem with a bunch of black kids. Nat X was pushing the public to demand an indictment of Officer Kim and his cause was furthered by an activist Baptist minister from Harlem, the Reverend Mufti, and as Tanenbaum wrote, “known more for his inflammatory politics than his work in any church.” Then there was Peter Vansand, a television correspondence whose career was in the tank, and Vansand was looking for a story that would put him back on network TV. He thought Nat X was his ticket back to national fame.

It was Nat X who got Vansand to hire Oliver Gray as an unpaid intern, and who arranged for Vansand and his TV crew to have the right camera angle when Gray attempted to assassinate Karp as the DA was making an announcement about the delay in a decision about Kim’s indictment. It was Gray who was killed, not Karp.

The racial tensions in and out of the NYPD were believably portrayed. The courtroom drama was just that, dramatic and gripping. I could not put this one down. Now that I’ve learned about Tanenbaum and this Karp-Ciampi series, I’ve downloaded the first of those 29 novels, No Lesser Plea, published in 1987, and I’m ready to learn more about these characters.