Thanks for the suggestions, Manuel.
IIRC (new vocabulary!), Lopez came to
the Inquirer as a columnist in the early 1980s from
California. He liked to follow a scratch kids' baseball team
some priest in Camden put together. (Camden--there's a place
that's really gritty: poorest city in the country, the
residents try to burn it down every Halloween, gateway to the
Garden State; it used to have the closest supermarket and
Sears for people in Philly, but the stores were shut down,
still empty 20 years later the last I looked.)
I read "Third & Indiana" and
liked it. It had a lot of local color--plenty, I guess, if I
didn't know Kensington Avenue, Front & Lehigh, Needle
Park Public Library, the year the banks disappeared, the bad
smack day.
What's "Sunday Macaroni Club" about?
It sounds like South Philly.
The new one seems to be a mystery,
more or less. I apparently require that plot format to be
happy with fiction.
Joy, Two-Streeter in the Rizzo years
> You might look at "Third and Indiana" and "The
Sunday Macaroni Club" by
Steve Lopez, a former reporter for the Philadephia Inquirer.
These are loaded with local color, written by a guy who lived
and worked in the city of brotherly love. His new one, set
for May publication, is entitled In The Clear. The book
description at Amazon says: "Albert LaRosa has spent his
whole life just trying to get from yesterday to tomorrow.
Born, raised, and now the sheriff of a small New Jersey
island town, he was forced back to his hometown of Harbor
Light after his shot at the big time as a cop in Philadelphia
was destroyed by the events of one dark night. Twenty-five
years and one marriage later, it looks as if life might
finally give him a break. Albert is offered a job as chief of
security at a new casino at a salary he has only dreamed of.
Not that his dreams were ever very grand. Of course, not
everyone in town is equally happy. Albert can live with the
death threats. And the bombing!
> s. Even a dead body provides some professional
excitement. He can take
his father's tirades about selling out and he can cope with
his girlfriend, Rickie, losing her business--at least he's
always been a good friend to her son, Jack. What bothers him
is that he might have to arrest one of them for
murder."
>
> Manuel Ramos
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