Here is what I want you to do.

Pick up the phone. Order a ton of, uh, manure to be dumped in your front yard. After it's dumped, take your best shovel and move it to your back yard, shovel by shovel by shovel. After you get the last little bit of honey-scented material out of your front yard and around back, take that same shovel and move it all back to the front yard, shovel by shovel. Repeat. Oh, I forget to mention one thing. Tie a 10 pound weight around you while you're doing it, and tie one hand behind your back, too. That'll give you an idea of what it is like to be a district attorney, or "D.A.," as they are referred to. The D.A.s, or prosecutors, are the sanitation engineers in the backed-up sewers that are more commonly known as "cities." Here is how it works. Or how it is supposed to work, anyway. The police are the garbage collectors. They bring the garbage in. The D.A. is supposed to make sure the garbage gets to the dump and stays there. There are all sorts of people who keep trying to undo the twist ties and let the garbage out, but we'll talk about them another time. Sounds like a video game, doesn't it? Except it never ends and the D.A. never wins. So if you want to see what it is like being a D.A., start shoveling. Or, read HOLLOWPOINT.

HOLLOWPOINT is author Rob Reuland's first novel. It is hard to believe that a first timer out of the blocks could write a book that is so good, so interesting, so real on so many different levels. But here it is. Exhibit A, if you will. Reuland, as the jacket says, "is a senior assistant district attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.'s office." By amazing coincidence, the same can be said of Andrew Giobberti. "Gio," as his friends call him, used to care about his job, and be quite good at it. A combination of factors, however, have changed him. The long hours, the endless parade of miscreants, the weight of human misery, and yes, the shoveling of offal from Point A to Point B. But what really caused Gio to skip loose of his moorings was the death of his five-year-old daughter. Now he is perpetually broke, habitually drunk and chronically on the make. While it is hard not to feel sorry for Gio, it is even harder to like him.

When we meet Gio he is prosecuting a case so much like his others that he is almost doing it by rote. The victim is a 14-year-old girl with an infant daughter, a coked-up mother, and a guilty-looking boyfriend. There is a lot that is wrong with this by-the-numbers prosecution, however. Gio doesn't care; the boyfriend looks good for it --- close enough for rock 'n' roll, anyway --- and even if he didn't do this one, so what? As Aunt Polly used to say about her nephew Tom Sawyer, he wouldn't miss a lick. Everyone, from the investigating cop to Stacy, Gio's young, attractive associate, knows that there is something wrong with this prosecution. Gio, however, couldn't care less what the cops think and is only interested in what Stacy thinks when she is drunk and underneath him. Meanwhile, Gio's moments, both sober and drunken, are haunted by the memories of his deceased daughter. He is teetering on the edge of destruction, both personally and professionally. No matter which way he falls, he'll take someone with him. But who?

HOLLOWPOINT is a dark, haunting book --- think of a depressed Dennis Lehane --- that has kept me up too late. Not reading it --- no, that only took an afternoon. I'm still dealing with the aftershocks. I hope you deal with them better than I have. If the events in HOLLOWPOINT aren't true, it's only because they haven't happened yet. They will. Read and be forewarned.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub


Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.

© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.

Back to top.