Apparition Alley
Author: Katherine V. Forrest
Watch your back when you're arresting a drug
suspect for the LAPD. If you don't, the
resulting gunplay could leave the suspect dead
and you wounded by friendly fire--and after
you're released from the hospital, as Det. Kate
Delafield learns, your problems really begin:
answering endless questions for a review board,
wondering which of your colleagues shot you,
sitting through hours of psychotherapy
sessions, and finally getting picked by Officer
Luke Taggart as the representative for the
hearing convened to determine why he shot a
drug dealer of his own in a late-night
hostage-taking. Taggart tells Kate he chose her
only because she's a good investigator whose
recent experience with the system will make her
sympathetic to him. But he doesn't act as if he
wants sympathy, even though his colleagues in
the Hollywood Division, outraged that he
informed on one partner who ate his gun, froze
him out even before he lost the second, Tony
Ferrera, in a liquor-store holdup. Instead,
Taggart, who insists against all the evidence
that he never fired his gun in Apparition
Alley, alternately acts secretive and
suspicious, and goes into paranoid attack mode
by insisting Ferrera was killed by cops because
of some story he was about to tell that would
blow the lid off a conspiracy of silence at the
troubled LAPD. Forrest (Liberty Square, 1996,
etc.) gives full weight to her lesbian
heroine's anguish at coming to terms with her
personal demons without ever swamping a
police-corruption plot that could have been
plucked from today's headlines. -- Copyright
©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.