Semiautomatic — Rob Reuland

Robert Reuland's hard-edged yet elegant writing has drawn comparisonsto that of writers as far-flung as Chandler, Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot, but his voice is all his own. With Semiautomatic, Reuland delivers another fist-in-the-gut novel set inside the courtroom and on the darkened street corners of Brooklyn. Drawing on his experience as a homicide prosecutor, Reuland captures lives on the edge, men and women working and dying in a very real world that most of us never see, although it exists right under our noses.

Semiautomatic follows Reuland's acclaimed debut, Hollowpoint, which introduced antihero Andrew Giobberti, a prosecutor reckoning with his daughter's accidental death while investigating a murder case that hits far too close to home. Now, eighteen months later, we find Gio gun-shy, living a rote existence, working in the sleepily academic Appeals Bureau. Then an opportunity comes for personal and professional rebirth: a murder trial.

Gio vows to play this one by the book, yet the difficulty of doing that quickly becomes apparent. He is paired with prosecutor Laurel Ashfield, and the two establish an instant mutual dislike. A key witness disappears. The case detective is conspicuously unavailable. The district attorney himself seems to have far more interest in the trial than the mundane facts would seem to merit. And Gio learns that it was not by chance that he was picked for this case.

Gio is swept into the seamy, seedy world of Brooklyn politics and prosecution, caught between decent lives and indecent corruption, between streets that are already too dangerous and a killer who will most certainly kill again. And in a world where right and wrong depend on everything from where you were born to where you were last standing, making the wrong choice may cost one man his career, or another man his life.