Black Sand

New York: Crown Publishers, Inc, 1989. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Michael Garland (Jacket Illustration) and Jill Le. [10], 339, [3] pages. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Inscription reads Feb. 7, 1989 To Stan Stirman--Happy Reading. Bill William J. Caunitz. United in a deadly struggle to recover a stolen ancient artifact are Det. Lt. Teddy Lucas of the NYPD and Maj. Andreas Vassos of the Hellenic National Police. William J. Caunitz (1933-1996) was a New York City Police Department officer who used his own experiences to write best-selling thrillers. After serving in the United States Marine Corps, and working for an insurance company, he joined the NYPD in his twenties. He first worked as a patrolman, and eventually rose through the ranks to become a lieutenant, followed by an assignment as a detective squad commander. Caunitz wrote with great authenticity when describing precinct day-to-day life in his novels. The New York Times has compared him to Joseph Wambaugh. His first novel One Police Plaza came out in 1984. It was made into a television film starring Robert Conrad in 1986. In 1988 the film got a sequel, The Red Spider. His novels usually center around one or two police officers that follow detailed police procedures to solve a crime, and he also used some sensational elements of thrillers. He did not write with an outline, preferring to let the plot evolve unpredictably as he was writing. Derived from a Kirkus review: Cleverly glazed with a colorful Greek backdrop and intricate police-procedural detail,. Caunitz opens in Greece--with a massacre in Voula that kills several, including the wife and child of Greek cop Andreas Vassos. His focus, as before, is on the N.Y.P.D., here represented by Lt. Teddy Lucas, Greek immigrant-turned-Yankeephile. It's Lucas who's assigned to work with Vassos when the Greek comes to Gotham to track down the criminal mastermind responsible for the massacre and its raison-d'etre: the theft from Greece of the casket copy of Alexander the Great's legendary and priceless manuscript of the Iliad, transcribed by Aristotle himself. Together, with the help of elegant rare-manuscript expert Katina Wright, the two cops penetrate the hermetic world of high-art theft, as well as the tangential but more thuggish world of a crime-ring based closely on N.Y.C.'s real-life Westies, not to mention the world of Greek New York--where Teddy, under Vassos' prodding, slowly finds reconciliation with his shucked Greek heritage. Teddy falls for and beds Katina; Vassos hires whores and pretends they're his dead wife; the unnamed villain keeps tabs on the cops' sleuthing by way of lunch at the Plaza with a State Department turncoat. Through methodic investigation, the two cops close in on their prey, and, in a final shoot-out at the gang's headquarters, meet up with the casket copy and--for one cop--death. Chock-full of nifty tidbits--how to unfurl a 2,000-year-old manuscript, how to beat an infrared alarm system-- the bang-bang climax. You've met these fuzz before, and the formula can't hide Caunitz's writerly skills.