Sleep With the Angels

by Robert Bolton

Book by Bolton, Robert, Musarra, Russ

344 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1985

About the author

Robert Bolton (1572 – 16 December 1631) was an English clergyman and academic, noted as a preacher.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.

Reviews

[Charles Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bought this mainly because I was sometimes getting vintage pulp paperbacks to a collector in Cleveland named Bob Romano. I figured he'd be amused that there was a locally self-published cop thriller novel starring a detective called "Bob Romano". Sadly, this private effort has no cheesecake cover by Paul Rader or someone like that. This book was actually a collaboration between a longtime Cleveland police officer and a Cleveland-Akron newspaper reporter. Self-published and not held to generally liberal-minded editorial copy editing! Premise is that a couple of Cleveland-area no-hoper black young adults, sociopath thugs with nothing on their minds but sex, getting money and killing whoever gets in the way (mostly fellow blacks) go on a robbing, raping and carjacking spree that leaves one police officer dead and another wounded. Veteran Det. Bob Romano takes this very personally and goes after the surprisingly elusive killers (who have members of the black community covering for them - no matter that most of their victims are also black). In the backdrop, Romano is walking out on his long marriage to his high-school sweetheart; apparently she's just boring him now. A soon-to-be divorced rape-victim nurse, impregnated by the thugs, excites Romano more. Their relationship heats up while the fugitive-hunting trail goes on throughout northeast Ohio, with Romano occasionally bending/breaking rules to haul in the perps. If they even survive their own homicidal ferocity and stupid life choices. One gets a sense of the two authors kinda venting over ugly things they've seen in their respective careers, not making fashionable excuses about racism, inequity and lack of Midnight Basketball as being responsible for urban crime. As a NE Ohio inhabitant myself, I have to say the writers did not make the place feel particularly appealing (the miserable winter weather comes across especially convincingly). Nor are there exceptionally likeable characters on either side of the law, except for a few innocent, grief-stricken family members on the sidelines. Which, perhaps, is fair, for a gritty, non-glorified cop procedural. Perhaps most noteworthy for me: almost no recognizable Cleveland-Akron landmarks at all. Street names, neighborhoods, shopping centers, plazas, all have name changes; there aren't even artful thin disguises. You must know that in Cleveland, an economically depleted Rust Belt community with a decided inferiority complex and PR issues, it is usually a la mode for our storytellers to nonetheless insinuate as much Clevelandiana into their narratives as possible, right down to plugs for favorite restaurants, museums or music clubs. Not the case here. We just sound like no fun at all [...here the reviewer refrains from further comment]. Evidently there were plans for the self-published authors to do more Bob Romano novels, but I never stumbled across one. But I do hope my pulp-paperback-collector connection, the real Bob Romano, did get a smile or two out of the thing. And maybe went on to posting gloriously garish cover scans of his basement spinner-rack collection online, once the Internet arose to take our minds of all the Cleveland woe.

[Brandon Deer · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐

I was expecting this book to be more cliché and with quite a bit of pro-cop propaganda, as it was written by a white cop in the 80s. I was pleasantly surprised to read about how cops are not always law-abiding and some of the nuances of being a cop. But the inherent racism of the 80s definitely shines through in this one.