As we get near the end of the year, I’ve read another author who is new to me, and committed what would normally be a reading faux pas for me. I read Robert K. Tanenbaum’s 2008 novel, Escape, which is the 20th book in his Roger “Butch” Karp series, which follows the machinations of the District Attorney for New York County, which is essentially Manhattan, the biggest District Attorney’s Office in the United States, and whatever shenanigans him and his family need to thwart.
Tanenbaum’s book was quite the one to take on toward the end of the year because it clocks in at 696 pages, but it’s a tour-de-force that juggles Nazis, Islamic terrorists, a mother who killed her three children, and numerous side characters and nefarious plots, and somehow it all mostly works. If I had one criticism, but which admittedly stems from my own ideological bent: Naturally, a story written from the point-of-view of a prosecutor-as-protagonist is going to be hostile, in some respects, to defense attorneys and their expert witnesses. I am more naturally skeptical of prosecutors and their expert witnesses than I am of defense attorneys. But still, I liked Karp and his family (his wife with security experience, daughter who speaks like 69 languages, and I’m not exaggerating, and father-in-law who seems to be experiencing early onset Alzheimer’s, but wants to prove he still has value) because they have integrity and principles, and are committed to doing things the right way. They’re good people, and Karp is particularly friendly to people far below his station, as it were, the “street characters” of Manhattan, like a news vendor with Tourette syndrome, or a giant, smelly man named “Booger,” who end up being pivotal characters throughout the plot.
Speaking of plot, the plot is essentially two-fold: 1.) The aforementioned trial Karp is trying of a mother, a radical leftist, who kills her three young children supposedly in the name of God and is arguing the insanity defense for that reason (because of her inflammatory ways, I was a bit skeptical that the public and newspaper editorials would be so against Karp trying the case and public favor would be on her side, not to mention just the heinousness of the crime); and 2.) A trifecta of Islamic terrorists, Russian spies, and the Sons of Man elitist rich white man group in America all looking to take down the “Great Satan” for their own reasons, which bring them together.
The throughline thread that brings these seemingly disparate plots together is the story of the Nazis treatment of Jews and the Holocaust. Karp is a Jew, and one of the catalyzing events of the book is an Islamic terrorist who blows himself up inside Karp’s synagogue. Through that experience, Karp meets a bakery owner who is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor. As we know, and Tanenbaum explains through the bakery owner, many of the Germans and Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust tried to hide their actions and/or blame it on scapegoats, whomever those may be. Likewise, Islamic terrorists say they are killing in Allah’s name, and in that way, Allah becomes their scapegoat. Ergo, the mother, who claimed to kill in her children in God’s name, ought to still be held legally culpable, the argument goes. I didn’t like Karp in his closing argument making that thread blatantly obvious by comparing the mother to Nazis because it sort of diminishes the severity of the Nazis’ actions, in my humble opinion, but I get what Tanenbaum was going for with it.
But also, Tanenbaum presents good versions of listening to God and his messengers. Miriam, who was one of my favorite characters in the book, was quasi-forced to marry the man who would go on to bomb the synagogue. But she’s a good Muslim and devout in the right way. Yet, she also hears from one of Allah’s messengers, a female martyr from centuries before who guides her. That same messenger would go on to help Lucy, Karp’s daughter, at the end of the novel. In other words, even if you think you are truly hearing the words of God, that is no reason for perpetrating evil. (The bookends of the book draw the analogy to Abraham and God calling him to kill his son Isaac, and Tanenbaum reveals at the end that Karp believes, rightly, he would charge Abraham with murder had God not ultimately intervened.)
Overall, like any book at this length, you have to wonder, as I did, if some of it couldn’t have been trimmed without taking away from the themes, characterizations, and plotting, but I wasn’t bored at any point. I predicted some of the major plot points (the Saudi prince’s COO being the evil Sheik, for example), but I enjoyed how Tanenbaum arrived at such points, and then flushed them out. And if I didn’t emphasize it enough, I really liked the street characters of Manhattan factoring so much into the plot helping the good guys in their battle against the Russians, Islamic terrorists, and Sons of Man. Even the sidebar stuff with Karp’s “Breakfast Club” of retired men from public service was entertaining, even if they were self-referentially “dirty old men.”
The only difficult part with having such an important public figure as Karp as your central protagonist is the absurdity of him joining the police response to the Islamic terrorists’ attempt to bomb and shut down the New York Stock Exchange. It would like Alvin Bragg following NYPD SWAT into a hot zone of gunfire exchange, hostages, and potential bombings. But also, it’s fun fiction, so, I don’t hold it against Tanenbaum.
As a first introduction to Tanenbaum and his Karp character, I’m intrigued to read more from him, and particularly the book that came after this one because tantalizingly, Tanenbaum left some loose threads hanging out there …
Milam's Musings 