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Lt. Frank Carlucci #1-3
Carlucci 3-in-1
Collected together for the first time in one volume-this is Richard Paul Russo's critically-acclaimed science fiction trilogy featuring police Lt. Frank Carlucci investigating high-tech crime and corruption in a near-future San Francisco.
624 pages, Paperback
First published September 2, 2003
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March 3, 2023
Ah, San Francisco. City by the Bay, home of the Golden Gate Bridge, corny sitcom classic "Full House", sourdough bread, trolley cars, psychedelic art, tilted streets and at least for me, the first place I tried that delightful slab of caramel known as the stroopwaffle.
If you've never been there before it’s a pretty fun city (I've been there twice, once solo and once with my spouse, about a decade apart) and well worth taking some time to explore. And maybe if you explore it long enough you'll see it through the same eyes that Richard Paul Russo did when he looked around and said "I want to write about this place, but only if its buried in CRIME."
Hence here we are, getting the crime-ridden hive of scum and villainy that certain news channels that try to convince you already exists today as a lawless enclave watered only by the tears of its citizens crying for just a moment's respite from the ceaseless, endless waves of murder and larceny that batter them daily (that's not to say that Russo has some political agenda here, as far as I can tell he doesn't seem to have it out personally for old San Fran, he probably just needed somewhere picturesque to have people murdered in creatively gruesome ways). For average citizen under siege there appear to be only two routes to salvation . . . become rich (which seems to require you to be kind of a criminal?) or rely on the police (who are either overwhelmed or corrupt or overwhelmed with all the options to be corrupted). Um, good luck?
Its not a cheery place by any means but then Russo doesn't seem to be a real cheery writer. The one novel of his I have read, "Ship of Fools", managed to win the Philip K Dick Award but didn't seem to know if it wanted to be a depressing space opera or a depressing horror tale and thus didn't do much service to either. Meanwhile at some point they came out with an omnibus of his "Carlucci" novels and if there's anything I couldn't resist at a certain age it was the words "critically acclaimed trilogy for the first time in one volume" appearing in a sentence on the cover. So while "Ship of Fools" didn't instill much confidence that he's the kind of writer I would be into, I'm all about second chances.
At first glance this is the exactly the kind of thing that's in my wheelhouse . . . futuristic crime stories in a scenic locale where a weary and cynical hero fights against the machine for whatever small bits of justice he can scrape out of the gutter? Sign me up! While Raymond Chandler isn't anywhere near SF, there's a part of me that is always up for moral grey areas and crimes where you know who did it but you aren't able to do anything about it because the world is an utterly unfair place. Give me the right tour guide and I will gladly go along with books like that, if only because they seem to be more optimistic than the world we currently inhabit.
Unfortunately I already got that book and it was Richard K Morgan's "Altered Carbon", also set in a future San Francisco that has become the kind of city created when Gotham City has nightmares but adding heaps of style and a smartmouthed protagonist who isn't too concerned about what he says to just about anyone even if it results in getting punched in the face repeatedly. Its dark and extremely (extremely!) violent but also possesses the right amount of Marlowesque "I can't go on, I'll go on" to make it not just an empty exercise in figuring out how many different ways there are to describe someone's head exploding.
Russo's "Carlucci" series, to his credit, was first and has a slightly different focus . . . Morgan's novel was more private detective oriented while Russo is shooting for a police procedural vibe, with homicide detectives detectiving in increasingly hopeless cases although mercifully without the typical television version of such things where they just keep accusing different people of doing the crime-of-the-week until the runtime is nearly finished and they magically find the right person. And honestly if you like those kinds of shows this might be the series for you because it feels very bread-and-butter that way . . . subtract a lot of the futuristic backdrop and you have something that doesn't necessarily feel out of place on a show like "Criminal Minds" (especially the first novel) and there's quite a few moments where the futuristic setting doesn't seem to matter all that much. If you're searching the squalid apartment of a murder victim for clues it doesn't particularly seem to matter what year it is, in all honesty.
Still, you have to ask yourself if Russo can really get three novels out of this and as we so often find out the answer is . . . kind of. Kind of like two and a half novels really, as the first novel doesn't even star Carlucci but does serve as a gateway as to what we're going to be experiencing for the rest of the series. Unfortunately for the curious reader, its also the weakest of the set.
That's "Destroying Angel" and while it sets the tone for what's to come it also doesn't engender a lot of confidence that we're in good hands here. Our hero here (and only here) is Louis Tanner, who used to be a cop but found being a cop too soul-draining and so has gone the more uplifting route of smuggling medicines in for the various clinics that operate in the city. So he's a criminal technically but also one of the good guys and he maintains various contacts with his old comrades in the police force, especially our boy Carlucci. Still, even with his new direction in life Tanner isn't having a good go of things, having recently broken up with his girlfriend because he's too dour to cohabit with anyone right now and generally wondering what the purpose of life is. He's got a past that is a several layer cake of traumas and no matter how hard he tries they seem to keep finding his address and dropping in for a visit. Yeah, he could use a therapist or ten or at least a trip to somewhere with a bit more hope. Like Mordor.
So Tanner's not really much of a bundle of fun and that's before the deadly serial killer from years ago turns up to start killing again, which let's just say doesn't improve his mood any.
This killer has a weird "only in fiction" motif where he kills two victims, chains them together and tattoos an angel or something on the inside of their nostrils, like someone who saw "Wings of Desire" years ago and one hundred percent took the wrong message from it. Tanner was pursuing this case years ago before he quit the force but he never got to follow up his last lead before the killings stopped. Now that it's back he's ready to be pulled back in and finish what he started to finish years ago before the corpses start showing up in strange places again. He's got Carlucci to give him some inside info and his old lead to get him kil-er, bring him closer to the truth. What could go wrong?
Maybe one or two things. The case is fairly straightforward once you strip the angel symbolism away from everything so it feels like Russo has to muddy the waters/pad things out with threads that don't go anywhere. Tanner's sad life mostly exists to set the tone and he spends much of the novel being emotionally closed off to people that are very much trying to make him feel something. A little girl who keeps popping up is heavily implied to be connected to Tanner in some way (to yet another past trauma) but once again, Russo never goes anywhere with it and her whole purpose seems to be to give Tanner something else to feel bad about later (you could almost excise her entire plot and not have too much effect on the novel).
The novel mostly seems to justify itself by taking us into the Tenderloin district, which is almost its own separate entity that is supposed to act as a little island inside San Francisco but people seem to get in and out of fairly easily. There's some interest in how Tanner navigates the terrain there, especially after he's been away for so long (i.e. poorly) but the end result is so relentlessly dour that you're wishing for some break in the clouds.
There's none, of course. The case resolves, then is resolved again in true cynical fashion and we're basically left with Carlucci and Tanner standing around going "Well, that sucked." There's depressing to illuminate certain uncomfortable aspects of the human condition and there's depressing for the sake of depressing and you can guess which one this falls into. There's a decent novel in here about how recovery from trauma isn't a given, no matter how much you or those around you want it to happen, but every time Russo flirts with that angle there's just another bit of awful violence or "what's the point" gyrations. I'm not looking for redemption in my dystopian adjacent crime novels but if this is just an exercise in proving to me that bad things happen to people who don't deserve it . . . okay, but I knew that already. Why else am I here?
Carlucci finally graduates from glorified wingman to starring in the series bears his name with "Carlucci's Edge" and the results are a little better. We finally truly meet Carlucci, an honest cop with a loving family (wife, two daughters, although we find out just to up the angst that one daughter has a short life expectancy due to a dormant terminal illness that remains somewhat ill-defined). This time out he has to juggle an official case and an unofficial case he assigns himself. The mayor's nephew has bitten the dust and the city can't seem to decide if he should be solving this. Meanwhile a random punk is found dead and his heartbroken lover is eventually given Carlucci's name as a possible help in solving the case. He'd rather not, but she does ask nicely and in a wonderful bit of confluence it turns out the cases might have more to do with each other than they seem. Unfortunately everyone realizes this at nearly the same time, so time to cover up the evidence!
This one benefits from having a cast that straddles the line nicely between "weary" and "vaguely hopeful" without falling into the "nothing matters" tone of the last novel. Bereft girlfriend Paula gets quite a bit of screentime and Russo captures the conflicting emotions of someone who wants to wallow in intense grief (understandably so) but also try to find some answers, even if she won't enjoy what they might reveal to her.
It’s a more complex novel than its predecessor, with several moving parts as Carlucci has to weave his way through internal department politics and the broader concerns of the city's administration, plus all the criminals that Paula's boyfriend managed to irritate doing whatever he did. There's also a crack investigative reporter roaming around, which makes for an interesting subplot . . . everyone knows a little bit of something and the novel has some fun with the tensions of everyone trying to determine what everyone else knows (or is bluffing about) and what they're able to risk saying. As before, much of the action centers in the Tenderloin, which is as happening as always . . . come for the generic future squalor but stay for the insane woman saints who put men through strange tests.
I won't go as far to say this is fun but at least its more interesting than "Destroying Angel" . . . the broader cast goes a long way toward helping with this (another holdover from the first novel, Mixer, makes a much welcomed stronger impression here) and there's this insistent pulse of people attempting to solve something big and perhaps make a change in their own small corners of the city, or barring that, at least themselves. Carlucci is a much stronger lead than Tanner and even if the action never rises above that of "competent procedural" its got enough twists and turns to make it somewhat worth your while. Its got enough vague SF to set it apart from just cops being cops but never seems to fully commit (a scene with a "slug" someone jacked up on meds to help them with intuitive leaps, never seems to really catch fire despite the book really wanting it to). The biggest problem is that besides the references to place names it really could take place anywhere . . . if the style was as little more in-your-face maybe that would be easier to overlook but even a future San Francisco should sort of feel like actual San Francisco. So its meat and potatoes but its filling enough.
Its also the last gasp of "business as usual" before "Carlucci's Heart" decides to go full-on scorched earth and eviscerate whatever small bits of sunshine managed to sneak through the two books. Its another "more than it seems" case although it escalates to the point of near absurdity. Carlucci's daughter Caroline takes center stage this time . . . she's living on borrowed time in a sense but her health isn't the problem. Visiting a sort of hospice house to see a friend dying of AIDS she finds him missing . . . the one witness said he was taken by "Cancer Cell", a mysterious science organization that appears to operate out of the Core in the center of the Tenderloin. Needless to say, she wants to find out what happened to her friend and off we go to complete mayhem.
But not right away. First we hang out with Dr Cage, Emotionally Damaged Doctor to the Stars and his merry crew as they try to procure medications for their clinics so they can give at least basic medical care to the poor and indigent. His team is doing their thing but eventually start noticing a weird illness popping up here and there, which should be alarming to, oh, anyone who has ever read a book or perhaps lived through the last few years. They're also getting the sense that Cancer Cell might be operating under the surface here but they're a relatively elusive group and honestly if Cage's crew can get what they need they're not super-inclined to ask questions.
Of course, Dr Cage's path will cross with Caroline's. Oh and her dad will get involved, too! And so, as it turns out, will most of the city.
Russo attempts to pivot a police procedural to a disaster novel almost in mid-stream and frankly, it works far more than it doesn't. The addition of Cancer Cell to the mix highlights what was most interesting about "Carlucci's Edge" . . . the notion of these simultaneously adversarial and symbiotic circles between the various factions operating in the city, where everyone is kind of doing their own thing (most of which is, shall we say, legally questionable) and only sometimes vaguely aware of each other. Its when those circles touch, even tangentially, and everyone involved is forced to examine what that means that the series comes more alive for me, watching a city that exists in this sort of rickety homeostasis suddenly be pushed out of its comfort zone, everyone scrambling for a new equilibrium before the walls start to collapse. When it pitches it right it typically works . . . after being teased with Cancer Cell for a chunk of the book when they do ultimately make an appearance it does feel like a curtain has been partially pulled back on how the city functions in its underground.
The book's pretty neat for me when Russo chooses to focus on that . . . however, and this is a problem throughout the series, a lot of times we get a lot of Sad People Being Sad so the overall atmosphere never feels less than grey (even a supposedly fun evening between Carlucci's daughters turns into a tearfest). I understand this version of San Francisco isn't the most optimistic of places but every single character seems deeply damaged in a way that you have to assume that either therapists are outlawed or the ones still left are very, very rich people. The few characters who aren't walking trauma cases are generally the most likely to die horribly/pointlessly, which only makes the survivors even more depressed.
And there's going to be a lot of that going around . . . remember those random bits of coughing? Yeah, its no more pleasant to read than it was to basically live through it, although the mortality rate is a bit higher and the temperature set more to hysterical drama but its essentially a COVID nightmare scenario with the CDC along for the ride and the rest of the government doing all the bad things the conspiracy theorists in real life only thought they were doing. Given everything we've seen already it makes a kind of sense but it feels like an escalation almost into the ridiculous. You keep waiting for a moment when the government is just going to saw off the city and let it float away into the ocean.
So its got its moments but it also has this muffled, tired feeling about it that doesn't do it any favors. We spend a lot of time in hospitals only to watch people pointlessly die, we see Carlucci flail against the diabolical power structure the city labors under, we have cutaways to a random monkey that I still don't understand (I think I know what he's going for but it doesn't have a hundredth of the chilling power of "the monkeys are screaming" panel from Grant Morrison's first arc on "Animal Man" all those years ago) . . . all the elements are kind of there for a classic thriller but it all feels very wan, despite some decent moments.
That's probably my biggest takeaway from the series . . . good but not great, but plenty of points for trying. Maybe it was Russo's decision to make his main character essentially part of the system that he's sometimes railing against dilutes some of the story's power, as opposed to someone outside commenting on it/barging in . . . after three straight books of the powerless being treated poorly and no one really suffering any meaningful consequences I'm not as sympathetic to someone inside that system being like "Boy, this kind of sucks" while also benefitting from the perks of it. Russo touches on that a little bit and I'm glad Carlucci sometimes feel bad about it, I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to take from this. Focus on the murder mystery and not the detailed setting he's chosen to let this all play out in? Then why bother with the setting in the first place? Most times it barely even feels like San Francisco beyond name-dropping various districts, so make of what you will.
I don't think Russo intended these as routine police procedurals with some extra set dressing, there's enough thought given to the interplay between the various parts of the city that it feels like some bigger ambition is at play. But he doesn't quite have the style or the weight to pull it off so it all feels scenic, an interesting series of plots that never quite cut as deeply as he wants them to.
If you've never been there before it’s a pretty fun city (I've been there twice, once solo and once with my spouse, about a decade apart) and well worth taking some time to explore. And maybe if you explore it long enough you'll see it through the same eyes that Richard Paul Russo did when he looked around and said "I want to write about this place, but only if its buried in CRIME."
Hence here we are, getting the crime-ridden hive of scum and villainy that certain news channels that try to convince you already exists today as a lawless enclave watered only by the tears of its citizens crying for just a moment's respite from the ceaseless, endless waves of murder and larceny that batter them daily (that's not to say that Russo has some political agenda here, as far as I can tell he doesn't seem to have it out personally for old San Fran, he probably just needed somewhere picturesque to have people murdered in creatively gruesome ways). For average citizen under siege there appear to be only two routes to salvation . . . become rich (which seems to require you to be kind of a criminal?) or rely on the police (who are either overwhelmed or corrupt or overwhelmed with all the options to be corrupted). Um, good luck?
Its not a cheery place by any means but then Russo doesn't seem to be a real cheery writer. The one novel of his I have read, "Ship of Fools", managed to win the Philip K Dick Award but didn't seem to know if it wanted to be a depressing space opera or a depressing horror tale and thus didn't do much service to either. Meanwhile at some point they came out with an omnibus of his "Carlucci" novels and if there's anything I couldn't resist at a certain age it was the words "critically acclaimed trilogy for the first time in one volume" appearing in a sentence on the cover. So while "Ship of Fools" didn't instill much confidence that he's the kind of writer I would be into, I'm all about second chances.
At first glance this is the exactly the kind of thing that's in my wheelhouse . . . futuristic crime stories in a scenic locale where a weary and cynical hero fights against the machine for whatever small bits of justice he can scrape out of the gutter? Sign me up! While Raymond Chandler isn't anywhere near SF, there's a part of me that is always up for moral grey areas and crimes where you know who did it but you aren't able to do anything about it because the world is an utterly unfair place. Give me the right tour guide and I will gladly go along with books like that, if only because they seem to be more optimistic than the world we currently inhabit.
Unfortunately I already got that book and it was Richard K Morgan's "Altered Carbon", also set in a future San Francisco that has become the kind of city created when Gotham City has nightmares but adding heaps of style and a smartmouthed protagonist who isn't too concerned about what he says to just about anyone even if it results in getting punched in the face repeatedly. Its dark and extremely (extremely!) violent but also possesses the right amount of Marlowesque "I can't go on, I'll go on" to make it not just an empty exercise in figuring out how many different ways there are to describe someone's head exploding.
Russo's "Carlucci" series, to his credit, was first and has a slightly different focus . . . Morgan's novel was more private detective oriented while Russo is shooting for a police procedural vibe, with homicide detectives detectiving in increasingly hopeless cases although mercifully without the typical television version of such things where they just keep accusing different people of doing the crime-of-the-week until the runtime is nearly finished and they magically find the right person. And honestly if you like those kinds of shows this might be the series for you because it feels very bread-and-butter that way . . . subtract a lot of the futuristic backdrop and you have something that doesn't necessarily feel out of place on a show like "Criminal Minds" (especially the first novel) and there's quite a few moments where the futuristic setting doesn't seem to matter all that much. If you're searching the squalid apartment of a murder victim for clues it doesn't particularly seem to matter what year it is, in all honesty.
Still, you have to ask yourself if Russo can really get three novels out of this and as we so often find out the answer is . . . kind of. Kind of like two and a half novels really, as the first novel doesn't even star Carlucci but does serve as a gateway as to what we're going to be experiencing for the rest of the series. Unfortunately for the curious reader, its also the weakest of the set.
That's "Destroying Angel" and while it sets the tone for what's to come it also doesn't engender a lot of confidence that we're in good hands here. Our hero here (and only here) is Louis Tanner, who used to be a cop but found being a cop too soul-draining and so has gone the more uplifting route of smuggling medicines in for the various clinics that operate in the city. So he's a criminal technically but also one of the good guys and he maintains various contacts with his old comrades in the police force, especially our boy Carlucci. Still, even with his new direction in life Tanner isn't having a good go of things, having recently broken up with his girlfriend because he's too dour to cohabit with anyone right now and generally wondering what the purpose of life is. He's got a past that is a several layer cake of traumas and no matter how hard he tries they seem to keep finding his address and dropping in for a visit. Yeah, he could use a therapist or ten or at least a trip to somewhere with a bit more hope. Like Mordor.
So Tanner's not really much of a bundle of fun and that's before the deadly serial killer from years ago turns up to start killing again, which let's just say doesn't improve his mood any.
This killer has a weird "only in fiction" motif where he kills two victims, chains them together and tattoos an angel or something on the inside of their nostrils, like someone who saw "Wings of Desire" years ago and one hundred percent took the wrong message from it. Tanner was pursuing this case years ago before he quit the force but he never got to follow up his last lead before the killings stopped. Now that it's back he's ready to be pulled back in and finish what he started to finish years ago before the corpses start showing up in strange places again. He's got Carlucci to give him some inside info and his old lead to get him kil-er, bring him closer to the truth. What could go wrong?
Maybe one or two things. The case is fairly straightforward once you strip the angel symbolism away from everything so it feels like Russo has to muddy the waters/pad things out with threads that don't go anywhere. Tanner's sad life mostly exists to set the tone and he spends much of the novel being emotionally closed off to people that are very much trying to make him feel something. A little girl who keeps popping up is heavily implied to be connected to Tanner in some way (to yet another past trauma) but once again, Russo never goes anywhere with it and her whole purpose seems to be to give Tanner something else to feel bad about later (you could almost excise her entire plot and not have too much effect on the novel).
The novel mostly seems to justify itself by taking us into the Tenderloin district, which is almost its own separate entity that is supposed to act as a little island inside San Francisco but people seem to get in and out of fairly easily. There's some interest in how Tanner navigates the terrain there, especially after he's been away for so long (i.e. poorly) but the end result is so relentlessly dour that you're wishing for some break in the clouds.
There's none, of course. The case resolves, then is resolved again in true cynical fashion and we're basically left with Carlucci and Tanner standing around going "Well, that sucked." There's depressing to illuminate certain uncomfortable aspects of the human condition and there's depressing for the sake of depressing and you can guess which one this falls into. There's a decent novel in here about how recovery from trauma isn't a given, no matter how much you or those around you want it to happen, but every time Russo flirts with that angle there's just another bit of awful violence or "what's the point" gyrations. I'm not looking for redemption in my dystopian adjacent crime novels but if this is just an exercise in proving to me that bad things happen to people who don't deserve it . . . okay, but I knew that already. Why else am I here?
Carlucci finally graduates from glorified wingman to starring in the series bears his name with "Carlucci's Edge" and the results are a little better. We finally truly meet Carlucci, an honest cop with a loving family (wife, two daughters, although we find out just to up the angst that one daughter has a short life expectancy due to a dormant terminal illness that remains somewhat ill-defined). This time out he has to juggle an official case and an unofficial case he assigns himself. The mayor's nephew has bitten the dust and the city can't seem to decide if he should be solving this. Meanwhile a random punk is found dead and his heartbroken lover is eventually given Carlucci's name as a possible help in solving the case. He'd rather not, but she does ask nicely and in a wonderful bit of confluence it turns out the cases might have more to do with each other than they seem. Unfortunately everyone realizes this at nearly the same time, so time to cover up the evidence!
This one benefits from having a cast that straddles the line nicely between "weary" and "vaguely hopeful" without falling into the "nothing matters" tone of the last novel. Bereft girlfriend Paula gets quite a bit of screentime and Russo captures the conflicting emotions of someone who wants to wallow in intense grief (understandably so) but also try to find some answers, even if she won't enjoy what they might reveal to her.
It’s a more complex novel than its predecessor, with several moving parts as Carlucci has to weave his way through internal department politics and the broader concerns of the city's administration, plus all the criminals that Paula's boyfriend managed to irritate doing whatever he did. There's also a crack investigative reporter roaming around, which makes for an interesting subplot . . . everyone knows a little bit of something and the novel has some fun with the tensions of everyone trying to determine what everyone else knows (or is bluffing about) and what they're able to risk saying. As before, much of the action centers in the Tenderloin, which is as happening as always . . . come for the generic future squalor but stay for the insane woman saints who put men through strange tests.
I won't go as far to say this is fun but at least its more interesting than "Destroying Angel" . . . the broader cast goes a long way toward helping with this (another holdover from the first novel, Mixer, makes a much welcomed stronger impression here) and there's this insistent pulse of people attempting to solve something big and perhaps make a change in their own small corners of the city, or barring that, at least themselves. Carlucci is a much stronger lead than Tanner and even if the action never rises above that of "competent procedural" its got enough twists and turns to make it somewhat worth your while. Its got enough vague SF to set it apart from just cops being cops but never seems to fully commit (a scene with a "slug" someone jacked up on meds to help them with intuitive leaps, never seems to really catch fire despite the book really wanting it to). The biggest problem is that besides the references to place names it really could take place anywhere . . . if the style was as little more in-your-face maybe that would be easier to overlook but even a future San Francisco should sort of feel like actual San Francisco. So its meat and potatoes but its filling enough.
Its also the last gasp of "business as usual" before "Carlucci's Heart" decides to go full-on scorched earth and eviscerate whatever small bits of sunshine managed to sneak through the two books. Its another "more than it seems" case although it escalates to the point of near absurdity. Carlucci's daughter Caroline takes center stage this time . . . she's living on borrowed time in a sense but her health isn't the problem. Visiting a sort of hospice house to see a friend dying of AIDS she finds him missing . . . the one witness said he was taken by "Cancer Cell", a mysterious science organization that appears to operate out of the Core in the center of the Tenderloin. Needless to say, she wants to find out what happened to her friend and off we go to complete mayhem.
But not right away. First we hang out with Dr Cage, Emotionally Damaged Doctor to the Stars and his merry crew as they try to procure medications for their clinics so they can give at least basic medical care to the poor and indigent. His team is doing their thing but eventually start noticing a weird illness popping up here and there, which should be alarming to, oh, anyone who has ever read a book or perhaps lived through the last few years. They're also getting the sense that Cancer Cell might be operating under the surface here but they're a relatively elusive group and honestly if Cage's crew can get what they need they're not super-inclined to ask questions.
Of course, Dr Cage's path will cross with Caroline's. Oh and her dad will get involved, too! And so, as it turns out, will most of the city.
Russo attempts to pivot a police procedural to a disaster novel almost in mid-stream and frankly, it works far more than it doesn't. The addition of Cancer Cell to the mix highlights what was most interesting about "Carlucci's Edge" . . . the notion of these simultaneously adversarial and symbiotic circles between the various factions operating in the city, where everyone is kind of doing their own thing (most of which is, shall we say, legally questionable) and only sometimes vaguely aware of each other. Its when those circles touch, even tangentially, and everyone involved is forced to examine what that means that the series comes more alive for me, watching a city that exists in this sort of rickety homeostasis suddenly be pushed out of its comfort zone, everyone scrambling for a new equilibrium before the walls start to collapse. When it pitches it right it typically works . . . after being teased with Cancer Cell for a chunk of the book when they do ultimately make an appearance it does feel like a curtain has been partially pulled back on how the city functions in its underground.
The book's pretty neat for me when Russo chooses to focus on that . . . however, and this is a problem throughout the series, a lot of times we get a lot of Sad People Being Sad so the overall atmosphere never feels less than grey (even a supposedly fun evening between Carlucci's daughters turns into a tearfest). I understand this version of San Francisco isn't the most optimistic of places but every single character seems deeply damaged in a way that you have to assume that either therapists are outlawed or the ones still left are very, very rich people. The few characters who aren't walking trauma cases are generally the most likely to die horribly/pointlessly, which only makes the survivors even more depressed.
And there's going to be a lot of that going around . . . remember those random bits of coughing? Yeah, its no more pleasant to read than it was to basically live through it, although the mortality rate is a bit higher and the temperature set more to hysterical drama but its essentially a COVID nightmare scenario with the CDC along for the ride and the rest of the government doing all the bad things the conspiracy theorists in real life only thought they were doing. Given everything we've seen already it makes a kind of sense but it feels like an escalation almost into the ridiculous. You keep waiting for a moment when the government is just going to saw off the city and let it float away into the ocean.
So its got its moments but it also has this muffled, tired feeling about it that doesn't do it any favors. We spend a lot of time in hospitals only to watch people pointlessly die, we see Carlucci flail against the diabolical power structure the city labors under, we have cutaways to a random monkey that I still don't understand (I think I know what he's going for but it doesn't have a hundredth of the chilling power of "the monkeys are screaming" panel from Grant Morrison's first arc on "Animal Man" all those years ago) . . . all the elements are kind of there for a classic thriller but it all feels very wan, despite some decent moments.
That's probably my biggest takeaway from the series . . . good but not great, but plenty of points for trying. Maybe it was Russo's decision to make his main character essentially part of the system that he's sometimes railing against dilutes some of the story's power, as opposed to someone outside commenting on it/barging in . . . after three straight books of the powerless being treated poorly and no one really suffering any meaningful consequences I'm not as sympathetic to someone inside that system being like "Boy, this kind of sucks" while also benefitting from the perks of it. Russo touches on that a little bit and I'm glad Carlucci sometimes feel bad about it, I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to take from this. Focus on the murder mystery and not the detailed setting he's chosen to let this all play out in? Then why bother with the setting in the first place? Most times it barely even feels like San Francisco beyond name-dropping various districts, so make of what you will.
I don't think Russo intended these as routine police procedurals with some extra set dressing, there's enough thought given to the interplay between the various parts of the city that it feels like some bigger ambition is at play. But he doesn't quite have the style or the weight to pull it off so it all feels scenic, an interesting series of plots that never quite cut as deeply as he wants them to.
November 8, 2012
I bought the Carlucci 3 in 1 book in part on the strength of
The Rosetta Codex
, in part because my wife likes crime books. The latter motive worked out.
Destroying Angel
In a gritty, modern San Francisco, an ex-cop and a teenage girl separately look out for a serial killer. There is an SF element to the book, but it's largely a crime story. As SF, it does a fair job describing a depressing near future San Francisco that's separated by class and inhabited by interesting characters. Unfortunately, Russo works a little too hard on painting the picture. Pretty much every time the protagonists turn around, there's another description of a new category of characters. After a while, it's just too much - we get the picture, it's gritty. I don't need to see the details of each particular kind of grit.
Rather than just running description, I would have preferred to see more about how this stratified society actually works. For example, Russo sets up the Tenderloin as a special sector that's hard to get in and out of. But after the first time, characters seem to get in and out with no trouble at all. And with so much of the city seemingly given over to vice and violence, it's hard to see why a special district is needed.
The story itself is a fairly straightforward crime story. It's reasonably well done, but nothing special. The characters are interesting, and the book stays readable, but not hard to put down. At some points, I was reluctant to pick it back up, but that may be because I'm more interested in SF than crime.
All in all, probably worth a read if you're a crime fan who can tolerate SF. Less worthy for SF fans who can tolerate crime.
Carlucci's Edge
The problem with describing a depraved society is that the violations need to be even more depraved to be credible. I found Carlucci's Edge to be less satisfying than its prequel. The plot, for one thing, hinged on a situation that was completely unsurprising in the milieu as described. The denouement left me wanting, thinking isn't there more?, even though it had been clear for some time that there wasn't.
The characters themselves were mildly interesting, but not deeply. Russo sets up several close relationships, but they were largely described in a cursory manner, and it was difficult to feel much about them.
The first novel had the benefit of (over-)describing a new and interesting environment. This story, though more involved, is less interesting, and neither engages our interest in the environment, nor sets out a sufficiently intriguing mystery to carry itself.
If you really liked Destroying Angel, or really like crime stories, this is worth a read, but otherwise, pass.
Carlucci's Heart
I found this story to be similar to its immediate predecessor, Carlucci's Edge, though with a bit more emotion to it. Russo completes several cycles, in a sense, by finally going further into the Core, and by tying up some loose ends about New Hong Kong.
Fundamentally, however, Edge and Heart were similar - Carlucci chances on a case, encounters resistance, deals with 'slugs', and spends a lot of time in the Tenderloin. His wife and family play a slightly larger role in this book, but while they play a nominally central role, they feel much more like adjuncts than key players.
Overall, a decent police story with a mild SF edge. Russo continues to rely heavily on pass-by descriptions of strange characters than on a fully developed economy or environment, and it shows.
Trilogy as a whole
As I noted at the beginning, I'm an SF reader, not a crime reader. These books are written for the converse audience. For me, they weren't satisfying. The SF trimmings are exactly that - trimmings. While the plot does depend on them in some way, an only slightly modified plot could have taken place in 1850. Russo depends quite a lot on description of outre types and a modern-noir feel, but I never had the feeling that his San Francisco could be a real place. For one thing, despite all the dropping of familiar street names, there's never a sense of the city as a whole, and how it functions on an economic and social level. The focus is always on the bizarre Tenderloin district, but Russo undercuts himself in selling it as isolated but showing that there is virtually unlimited access to it. If it's unclear how the city operates, the same is true of the Tenderloin, and, at the opposite end, of the nation as a whole - it's not even clear what the nation is.
As crime fiction, the stories seem acceptable, though I'm not the best judge. As science fiction, they don't work well. As literature in general, they're passable. It's clear from The Rosetta Codex that Mr. Russo can write fairly well. I don't believe he's done it here.
Destroying Angel
In a gritty, modern San Francisco, an ex-cop and a teenage girl separately look out for a serial killer. There is an SF element to the book, but it's largely a crime story. As SF, it does a fair job describing a depressing near future San Francisco that's separated by class and inhabited by interesting characters. Unfortunately, Russo works a little too hard on painting the picture. Pretty much every time the protagonists turn around, there's another description of a new category of characters. After a while, it's just too much - we get the picture, it's gritty. I don't need to see the details of each particular kind of grit.
Rather than just running description, I would have preferred to see more about how this stratified society actually works. For example, Russo sets up the Tenderloin as a special sector that's hard to get in and out of. But after the first time, characters seem to get in and out with no trouble at all. And with so much of the city seemingly given over to vice and violence, it's hard to see why a special district is needed.
The story itself is a fairly straightforward crime story. It's reasonably well done, but nothing special. The characters are interesting, and the book stays readable, but not hard to put down. At some points, I was reluctant to pick it back up, but that may be because I'm more interested in SF than crime.
All in all, probably worth a read if you're a crime fan who can tolerate SF. Less worthy for SF fans who can tolerate crime.
Carlucci's Edge
The problem with describing a depraved society is that the violations need to be even more depraved to be credible. I found Carlucci's Edge to be less satisfying than its prequel. The plot, for one thing, hinged on a situation that was completely unsurprising in the milieu as described. The denouement left me wanting, thinking isn't there more?, even though it had been clear for some time that there wasn't.
The characters themselves were mildly interesting, but not deeply. Russo sets up several close relationships, but they were largely described in a cursory manner, and it was difficult to feel much about them.
The first novel had the benefit of (over-)describing a new and interesting environment. This story, though more involved, is less interesting, and neither engages our interest in the environment, nor sets out a sufficiently intriguing mystery to carry itself.
If you really liked Destroying Angel, or really like crime stories, this is worth a read, but otherwise, pass.
Carlucci's Heart
I found this story to be similar to its immediate predecessor, Carlucci's Edge, though with a bit more emotion to it. Russo completes several cycles, in a sense, by finally going further into the Core, and by tying up some loose ends about New Hong Kong.
Fundamentally, however, Edge and Heart were similar - Carlucci chances on a case, encounters resistance, deals with 'slugs', and spends a lot of time in the Tenderloin. His wife and family play a slightly larger role in this book, but while they play a nominally central role, they feel much more like adjuncts than key players.
Overall, a decent police story with a mild SF edge. Russo continues to rely heavily on pass-by descriptions of strange characters than on a fully developed economy or environment, and it shows.
Trilogy as a whole
As I noted at the beginning, I'm an SF reader, not a crime reader. These books are written for the converse audience. For me, they weren't satisfying. The SF trimmings are exactly that - trimmings. While the plot does depend on them in some way, an only slightly modified plot could have taken place in 1850. Russo depends quite a lot on description of outre types and a modern-noir feel, but I never had the feeling that his San Francisco could be a real place. For one thing, despite all the dropping of familiar street names, there's never a sense of the city as a whole, and how it functions on an economic and social level. The focus is always on the bizarre Tenderloin district, but Russo undercuts himself in selling it as isolated but showing that there is virtually unlimited access to it. If it's unclear how the city operates, the same is true of the Tenderloin, and, at the opposite end, of the nation as a whole - it's not even clear what the nation is.
As crime fiction, the stories seem acceptable, though I'm not the best judge. As science fiction, they don't work well. As literature in general, they're passable. It's clear from The Rosetta Codex that Mr. Russo can write fairly well. I don't believe he's done it here.
February 16, 2013
This series of 3 mystery novels that take place in a futuristic San Francisco was so imaginative and yet so believable. As opposed to some other science fiction, the characters did not lose their depth but were also easy to relate to and interesting to follow over time. This book was suggested by an employee at the Elliot Bay Booksellers store in Seattle several years ago, and it sat on my shelf unfortunately for that long. I loved the prosthetic faces and limbs, the descriptions of SF and places that I know which have morphed into different places in this novel, the slugs who are altered by the mind-enhancing drugs they inject, and so much more. Fabulous!
July 7, 2022
This is the trilogy together and is the copy I own.
Destroying Angel- (2 stars) The main police investigator in this one is Tanner, not Carlucci. Perhaps I am the wrong audience for this book as I don’t particularly enjoy horror-thrillers, but even more than being the wrong audience I thought the almost-ending was bad. It’s a trilogy though so I am a bit tempted to continue since I’ve already invested this much.
Carlucci's Edge- (2.5) I liked this one much better than the first one in the series, Destroying Angel. The characters were interesting and a bit more developed than in the first, though not much. The scary scenes were thankfully not so scary nor frequent.
The whole Mixer story was ridiculous. I blame him for Suki’s life choices in the first book, so I didn’t have the most sympathy for him. But still, what happens to him and how he reacts is absurd. Also, why didn’t Carlucci arrest Saint Catherine, Saint Lucy, and the entire cult?
It was all very silly but kind of fun.
Carlucci's Heart- (2 stars) This is a pandemic book hiding in a cop thriller. The plot is unlikely as the others in the series. It also meanders for pages and pages. There was never a payoff in this series.
Destroying Angel- (2 stars) The main police investigator in this one is Tanner, not Carlucci. Perhaps I am the wrong audience for this book as I don’t particularly enjoy horror-thrillers, but even more than being the wrong audience I thought the almost-ending was bad. It’s a trilogy though so I am a bit tempted to continue since I’ve already invested this much.
Carlucci's Edge- (2.5) I liked this one much better than the first one in the series, Destroying Angel. The characters were interesting and a bit more developed than in the first, though not much. The scary scenes were thankfully not so scary nor frequent.
The whole Mixer story was ridiculous. I blame him for Suki’s life choices in the first book, so I didn’t have the most sympathy for him. But still, what happens to him and how he reacts is absurd. Also, why didn’t Carlucci arrest Saint Catherine, Saint Lucy, and the entire cult?
It was all very silly but kind of fun.
Carlucci's Heart- (2 stars) This is a pandemic book hiding in a cop thriller. The plot is unlikely as the others in the series. It also meanders for pages and pages. There was never a payoff in this series.
November 9, 2011
This book got better as the writing continually became better. It's somewhat dark, about a futuristic cop. A cop with morals. A good story, not a best seller, but if you come across it, give it a try. Not horrible as I first thought.
September 10, 2013
A highly enjoyable cyberpunk romp with adventures through San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Filled with gleaming hi-tech and gritty noir, this series of three of Richard Paul Russo's Carlucci tales is a great find.
December 22, 2018
I went into this blind. It was very strange, but in a bad way. And the character Carlucci was hardly in most of the books.
May 23, 2012
I don't have much of a review to give. This was a book that my husband picked out and I decided to give it a try. It took me a while to get into. It had it's moments where it had me in it's grips. But for the most part I was ready to be done with it. I enjoyed the final story best. All of the stories had to do with New Hong Kong and all the medical advances they were making up there. New Hong Kong was not on earth. I couldn't tell if it was a space station or another planet. My husband may enjoy this more than I did.
July 23, 2008
I found this book at the Marion County library sale for two bucks. Its all sci-fi. Its three books in one. So one weekend when it was cold and I was bored, I read it all. I loved the fact that I had the same characters in all three books as the story was told. Nice touch. So, if youre a sci-fi reader, add this one to the list. Make sure, if you cant find the triple book, to read the stories in order. Might make a good movie.
Want to read
June 26, 2009Recommended by the same guy who told me
Air
was an amazing, life-altering work. So you can imagine my skepticism.
Joe, I love you, but I'm just not sure about your literary sensibilities...
Joe, I love you, but I'm just not sure about your literary sensibilities...
June 20, 2007
Awesome distopia story of San Francisco
March 7, 2008
I've read the first part of this, and it's really good. Dark, sad and very well written.
July 16, 2008
best random buy i have had.
August 2, 2010
Paints a vivid, bleak, and incredible picture of San Fran in the future.
February 16, 2010
I only made it about half way through "Carlucci's Edge."
I need less darkness for a while.
I'll come back to it later.
I need less darkness for a while.
I'll come back to it later.
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