When a years-long case against a powerful mobster finally cracks and an unimpeachable witness takes the stand, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton is looking forward to putting the defendant away for good. The mobster, though, has other plans. As the witness's testimony concludes, a note is passed to the prosecution offering up information into the assassination of a disgraced former New York governor, murdered in his penthouse apartment just days before. It's enough to blow the case wide open, and to send Nora into a high-stakes investigation of conspiracy, corruption, and danger.
The former FBI director is no monster, nor is he a great writer. But clearly his new thriller and its attendant publicity exist because of the author’s actions outside the realm of literature ... Central Park West starts promisingly enough ... That’s a sharp plot: We’ve got two intertwined high-stakes cases, one in state court, one in federal, and Comey knows enough about those separate legal systems to whip up some turf war over jurisdiction. But for an author who worked so long to imprison horrible criminals and to serve obnoxious politicians, his novel has no stomach for evil ... Central Park West is a thriller that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty, doesn’t even want to take off its tie.
The most intriguing thing about Central Park West—in a way, the real mystery here—is the strange sense that there is something missing. For all his power and access, all those decades of crimes and secrets, Comey has produced any other middle-aged lawyer’s clunky but passable fling at that courtroom novel he always threatened to write. It raises an almost depressing question: Does Comey—do any of these politicos turned authors—have anything to reveal at all? ... To describe the prose as workmanlike would be too kind. It is often lurching and awkward, and the dialogue frequently reads like someone ran the original English through a machine translator into a foreign language and back again ... Location descriptions are painful, like notes that a more fluent writer would plug in fully intending to come back to on a second draft ... But there is still something to like here. Within reason. For all its clichés, it is a work of genuine imagination. It is plotted with reasonable care ... How deflating, then, to discover that the most these semiretired potentates of the great secret machinery of government can imagine amounts to a rip-off of more professionally written TV shows and mid-tier Hollywood action properties.
This book is sure to get a lot of attention, considering the notoriety of its author, but regardless of what potential readers might think about the former FBI director, one thing is sure: his debut novel is a fine thriller ... Two more titles are planned in the series, and for once in the world of celebrity-authored thrillers, that’s not a bad thing.
