Tribeca Blues

Terry Orr #3

by Jim Fusilli

Taking on some pro-bono work to help his recovery from the deaths of his wife and son, private investigator Terry Orr searches for the elusive wife of a recently deceased friend and abruptly confronts the man he believes is responsible for his family's demise. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2003

About the author

Jim Fusilli is the author of nine novels including “The Mayor of Polk Street” and “Narrows Gate,” which George Pelecanos called “equal parts Ellroy, Puzo and Scorsese” and Mystery Scene magazine said “must be ranked among the half-dozen most memorable novels about the Mob.”

Jim’s debut novel “Closing Time” was the last work of fiction set in New York City published prior to the 9/11 attacks. The following year, his novel, “A Well-Known Secret” addressed the impact of 9/11 on the residents of lower Manhattan. Subsequent novels include “Tribeca Blues” and “Hard, Hard City,” which Mystery Ink magazine named its Novel of the Year. “Closing Time,” “A Well-Known Secret” and “Tribeca Blues” were reissued by Open Road Media in October 2018. Lawrence Block provided a new foreword for “Closing Time.”
Jim has published short stories that have appeared in a variety of magazines as well as anthologies edited by Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman and other masters of the mystery genre. He edited and contributed to the anthologies “The Chopin Manuscript” and “The Copper Bracelet.” His “Chellini’s Solution” was included in an edition of the Best American Mystery Stories and his “Digby, Attorney at Law” was nominated for the Edgar and Macavity awards. The novel “Narrows Gate” was nominated for a Macavity in the Best Historical Fiction category.
The former Rock & Pop Critic of The Wall Street Journal and an occasional contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Jim is the author of two books of non-fiction, both related to popular music. “Pet Sounds” is his tribute to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys’ classic album. It was translated for a Japanese language edition by Haruki Murakami Combining his interests, Jim edited and contributed a chapter to “Crime Plus Music: Twenty Stories of Music-Themed Noir,” published in 2017.
His novel for young adults “Marley Z and the Bloodstained Violin” was published by Dutton Juvenile.
Jim is married to the former Diane Holuk, a global communications executive. They currently reside just north of New York City. Find out more about them at https://jimfusilli.com/.

Reviews

[Maddy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been 5 years since the death of his wife and young son, but Terry Orr is still obsessed with finding Raymond Weisz, the man he believes was responsible for their death. That obsession is always beneath the surface, even as Terry tries to move on with his life and put the past behind him. Terry is raising his precocious 15-year-old daughter, Bella, on his own and has moved toward being a better parent than he was in the first several years after the incident.

As the book opens, a local restaurateur and good friend by the name of Leo Mallard dies. His last request is that Terry find his former wife Loretta, who he feels has cheated him out of a lot of money. Terry; his girflfriend Julie Gaida; Bella; and their family friend, Dennis Diddio, go to New Orleans to attend Leo's funeral. Out of the blue, Terry receives a fax that Raymond Weisz's mother has died. He immediately flies back to New York, feeling certain that Raymond will attend his mother's funeral and that he can confront the man who has ruined his life. His obsession is so great that he does not realize that he has again let down those who care about him—Julie, with whom he is beginning to open up; Bella; Diddio and not least of all, Leo, whose funeral he does not attend.

Just as it seems that Terry is going to follow the exact same path he has for the past 5 years and continue to be consumed by the past, he is faced with a startling revelation, one that changes everything that he has thought and believed to be true about his life and the lives of his loved ones. How he handles this new information leads to a riveting portrayal of a man whose entire belief system has to change.

Although less eloquently written than the first 2 books in the series, TRIBECA BLUES is much stronger in terms of plot and characterization than the earlier books. Terry has grown beyond his all-consuming fixation and seems willing to accept the help that he needs to face the future with optimism.

There are a few sub-plots which felt tacked on to make the plot more complex, including tracking down some money transactions involving Leo and his ex-wife Loretta. In my opinion, these threads distracted from the main narrative, which was very strongly delivered. In particular, the final resolution of the Weisz showdown was extremely powerful. As always, Fusilli masterfully describes the New York setting, its residents still shaken by the events of 9/11.

At the end, it is suggested that maybe now Terry can become a "real" private investigator. It will be interesting to see if Fusilli takes the character in that direction after having spent 3 books in dealing with the family deaths and finding Weisz. Whichever way he goes, I'll be right there with him.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

THIRD TIME NOT THE CHARM

This is the third installment in the Terry Orr chronicles. Terry is an independently wealthy Manhattanite, father of a precocious teenage daughter, (Bella), and a widower... His wife and young son tragically killed in the NY subway. Because of this tragedy, Terry has given up writing and become a pro bono PI, i.e. after reading the paper he takes on cases just because they spark his interest or capture his emotions.


This last premise, as goofy as it sounds, worked fairly well in the first two installments of this series because the author didn't let the the fact that Terry had no clients, nor did he collect fees, interfere with engaging story lines. In the background was always his family tragedy but without overwhelming the story.



In this book, five years after the event, the tragedy comes to the forefront as it inevitably had to. Unfortunately there is no real case or mystery to this book and without spoiling the plot, no real resolution for poor Terry.



All the quirks and nuances of the past books are here, including Bella's teenage witticisms, the geography of NYC, (usually while Terry is hoofing it), NPR programming, the Italian dishes served in the Orr household, Terry's habitual run-ins with the NYPD and for some reason, numerous brands and descriptions of bottled water. But unfortunately,at least for me, no engaging story line.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The patient, a 37-year-old male, is a historian by trade who suspended his career following the sudden, violent death of his wife and son some five years ago."

The patient is, of course, Terry Orr, still looking for Raymond Weisz, the madman responsible for the death of Terry's family. Tribeca Blues is the third installment of Jim Fusilli's series, following Closing Time and A Well-Known Secret , both pretty good novels that I rated with three solid stars on Goodreads. I did not expect much from the final novel in the series - after all, how many interesting variants of the same book can one produce - but neither did I expect that the novel will be so bad. I lost interest even before the middle of the story and I have been gnashing my teeth in frustration, forcing myself to finish reading.

In addition to the usual thread covering Terry's search for Weisz we have a story about Terry's and Diddio's friend, Leo Mallard. Leo dies, leaving a letter in which he asks Terry to find his ex-wife, Loretta, and "make her pay" for destroying his life. To me the worst thing about the novel are the totally unexpected turns of events. While some readers may enjoy the stunning plot surprises, I find them implausible, contrived, and just plain silly. The author must have tried hard to invent the most unlikely plot twists, and he succeeded at the expense of the realism and quality of the novel.

Absent is the wonderful portrayal of New York and the author's great sense of the place - the best aspect of the first book in the series - is nowhere to be seen. In the second book Mr. Fusilli was able to capture the deep wounds in the post-9/11 city's collective psyche, and this is also absent in Tribeca Blues, save for two token mentions. Even the thread involving Bella, Terry's 15-year-old daughter, has no spark in the third novel. What's worse, several dialogues are unforgivably cringeworthy, most notably the conversation between Terry and Loretta, and the Daniel Wu shtick is lame. The book escapes my bottom rating only because there are several fragments and passages, where - despite Mr. Fusilli's efforts to make the plot as ridiculously twisted as possible - his writing talent shows.

One and a half stars.

[Don Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3). I can always count on Jim Thane to turn me on to the wonderful world of classic mystery writers that I may not have previously encountered. This story has so many tentacles coming out of it you really have to pay attention. In less than 300 paperback pages you go through a lot of changes here. Terry Orr is a very cool, slighted but enduring protagonist who has become a PI for a distraction. He plays his role well, and we have an abundance of memorable side characters, including a Bassett hound named Beagle. It feels old school but it was written just 20 years ago. Good fun. Good stuff.

[Rogue Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 years after 9/11 and 5 years after the violent death of his wife and son, Terry Orr can't let go. Terrific sense of place, Manhattan streets, skyline, places. To have the comfort and security of wealth in this place seems rare

[Priscilla Shorne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this as I did the previous two. How nice to fine a confined series that ends when it should. Too many authors have series that become less than they were. Jimmy Fusilli leaves you wanting more

[Rosina Lippi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this series of books as a whole, so the review here is the same review you'll find for those books.

The four book in this series caught my attention walking through a bookstore. So I’m looking at is, reading the jacket copy, and wondering how I have missed this author and this series, because it’s got three things that I really like: a thoughtful, troubled, not always likeable main character (Terry Orr, an author turned private investigator); it’s set in modern day Manhattan — and not an idealized Manhattan, either; and there’s an extended cast of wonderful, very vivid characters.

Hard, Hard City is already the fourth book in this series, so I forced myself to go back and start with the first one. I’ve now read Closing Time and A Well-Known Secret, and as soon as I can get hold of Tribeca Blues and Hard, Hard City, I’ll read those. This review really covers all the ones I've read thus far.

Fusilli is a journalist, and he has an excellent website with lots of interesting essays. The essay “Why I stopped reviewing crime fiction” originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It gave me a lot to think about.

In any case, I would recommend these novels, which may not be flawless, but which are pretty damn good all the way around.

We meet Terry Orr at a bad time in his life. He had been a successful author, blissfully married with a young daughter and a two-year old son, when a madman shoves the baby’s stroller off a subway platform into the path of an express train. Terry’s wife Marina, an accomplished artist, goes after the boy to try to save him, and they both die. Terry is left with his ten year old daughter, Bella, some close friends, and a need for revenge that charges right over the line into obsession, and without apology.

These are crime novels with plots. Terry gets involved in the lives of people around him. When there is a crime that touches him, he takes it on, and pursues it. The violent act that changed his own life is a constant backdrop in the first two novels, but it’s not really integrated into the plots themselves.

Fusilli took on quite a challenge, approaching things this way. We’ve got the larger story: a character study of a man in terrible pain, struggling to make sense of things, to keep moving forward; he’s got a young daughter who needs him, after all. (And Bella is, without a doubt, my favorite character in these novels. I like her much more than I like her father.) Superimposed on that we get the individual crime plots in each of the books. Both elements are crucial, but Fusilli balances them far better in the second novel than he does in the first.

I liked the first novel — Closing Time — for its descriptions of Manhattan, and for the characterizations of the people closest to Terry. They were vivid and believable, touching and irritating, intriguing in many different ways. In contrast, the characters who were part of the murder investigation were flatter and felt — I suppose the only word that really works — unpolished. Not badly written, not at all: just distinctly less interesting than the main characters.

But the second novel. The Well-Known Secret gives me the sense of Fusilli as an author who has become comfortable with what he’s trying to do. He branches out a little in his approach in ways that really work for me. The novel starts with a newspaper article, an interest piece written about Terry, his background his losses, his daughter, his new work. I love bringing different kinds of texts into novels, and this is an excellent example of how to do that. It provides the backstory in an intriguing, clean, detached way, something Terry himself could not do as a first person narrator.

More than that, this novel is set post 9/11 in the very neighborhood that was most devastated by the loss of the Twin Towers. Terry’s daughter goes to a school where more than half the kids in her class have lost at least one parent in the attack; they were unable to enter their home for a month, and had to live in a hotel. I got a real sense of what it was like to survive 9/11 in TriBeCa, and to go on surviving it, but without even a touch of pathos. Here and there Terry provides details of what those days were like, simply, powerfully. This novel is worth reading for that aspect alone.

The bad news is, I don’t like Terry much. He is a man in pain, yes. He has suffered terribly, but he also wallows. I wanted to smack him by the end of this novel. So did a few of his fellow characters. This was only partly ameliorated by the absolutely perfect tone and pacing of the final chapter, where Terry goes with Bella to the subway station where Marina and Davy were so violently murdered, for the first time. I won’t say anything more about this chapter other than this: it deserves to be read.

I am sorry I was unaware of Jim Fusilli’s work for so long. I’m hoping there will be many more novels to come.

[Marti · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was good, but somehow could have been better. The main character, Terry Orr, seems to steep himself in regret and mayhem. It turns out that five years before, he misconstued the facts of his wife and infant son's death by a subway train. One of his best friends, who owns a bar, dies and since the funeral is in New Orleans, there is a group trip there for the funeral. Just how well did his daughter's boyfriend know Leo? Terry is confused, and at times violent, not unlike the novel.

[Tracy · Rating 3 out of 5]

fell apart at end - good til then

[Annette Dashofy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy does description and characterization about as good as it gets.