Uncle Janice

by Matt Burgess

Twenty-four-year-old Janice Itwaru is an “uncle”—NYPD lingo for an undercover narcotics officer—and the heroine of the most exuberantand original cop novel in years.


A New York City cop who can last eighteen months in Narcotics, without getting killed or demoted first, will automatically get promoted to detective. Undercover narc Janice Itwaru is at month seventeen. Ambitious, desperate for that promotion, she hits the sidewalks of Queens in her secondhand hoochie clothes, hoping to convince potential criminals—drug dealers, addicts, dummies, whomever—to commit a felony on her behalf. And things aren’t any easier back at the narco office, where she has to keep up with the bantering lies and inventively cruel pranks
of her fellow uncles while coping with the ridiculous demands of her NYPD bosses.
     With an ailing mother at home, her cover nearly blown, quota pressures from her superiors, and rumors circulating that Internal Affairs has her unit under surveillance, Janice is running terribly short on luck as her promotion deadline approaches. Now she has to decide which evil to the absurd bureaucrats at One Police Plaza, or the violent drug dealers who may already be on to her identity.
     Bursting with the glorious chaos of the New York City streets, Uncle Janice is both a deeply funny portrait of how undercover cops really talk and act, and a compelling story of their crazy, dangerous, and complicated lives.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller Suspense, New York, Book Club, Novels

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 6, 2015

About the author

Before graduating from Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, Matt Burgess grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. His hometown has served as the location for both his first novel, Dogfight, A Love Story, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and his second novel, Uncle Janice.

Reviews

[Melissa Price]

*Not my review yet and I don't post in the review boxes often, but this gift is incredible so I just had to:

OMG!! I just recieved this and I'm shocked. When I was entering the giveaway I thought the link to it being an audio entry was a mistake because it didn't say audio in the giveaway description. But it's an awesome audio package!! It's amazing and its going to be my first audio book that's fiction and also only my second audio book experience ever. Never thought I'd go the audio book direction and I will always prefer print over any reading formats, but this is so amazing !!! I wish I new how to post pictures in review boxes, but I don't so I'll post it on instagram. It's 8 CD's with 10 1/4 hours!! I'm so excited about this!!

Thank you so much Highbridge Audio!! Also, since the print format is Doubleday, THANK YOU, the Author Matt Burgess and Goodreads very much :')

Totally exited!! What an awesome gift <3 ~*Thank You*~

[Mackie Welch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Whoever blurbed it on the back as being like the Wire was dead on. A lot of tangential, but just as interesting stories, cops sitting around shooting the shit, and suspicion of both the "actual" criminals and the superiors within the police force itself.

I actually finished it a while ago, so I don't have a lot to say. I loved it, didn't want to put it down. That's a pretty good review in itself, no?

[Sandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not a traditional crime novel, since the emphasis was on characters and there was no real plot, I actually enjoyed this quite a bit. Janice was a very real character and while I hope her working life as an undercover narcotics cop was exaggerated it was interesting to read about. At times the prose style teetered on the overwritten but never went over the edge.

[Aimee Massey · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain, you'll like "Uncle Janice."
Janice Itwaru is a 24-year-old Guyanese-American police officer in New York City. In early 2008, she's nearly finished an eighteen-month stint as an undercover narcotics officer. In the NYPD, the cop who makes undercover drug buys is called an uncle.
The work is dangerous and frustrating. By law, when the dealers are arrested, they are informed of their charges, and when that charge is "selling drugs to an undercover officer" even the dullest of them easily figure out it was Janice who bought from them, and Janice who is the narc. So uncles have to continually expand their territory, searching for new locations where the dealers don't know them by sight.
Janice is rapidly becoming well-known to the dealers, and has had considerable trouble making buys lately, so much so that she's been told she needs to make four buys by the end of the month if she wants to be promoted to detective rather than being bumped back to patrol work.
The situation is not helped by the fact that Janice's mother, with whom she lives, is suffering from early-onset dementia, her estranged father is trying to make amends, her sister Judith is a pompous nuisance, and Janice is beginning to hit the bottle a bit too hard.
The plot itself is rather slow till the end, but I didn't mind much because the story is liberally spiced with colorful characters, hilarious situations and just the right serious note. Especially fun are the goings-on in the uncles' headquarters, which they call the Rumpus.
Janice herself is likable but often maddening in her sometimes flaky decisions and self-destructive tendencies. Her police partner, Chester Tevis, is an older officer, a former merchant seaman of unwavering integrity and kindness, and he was my favorite character.
No big mystery, no romance, just a fun, humorous read.

[Doubleday Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walking the line between literary fiction and enticing mystery may be harder than passing a field sobriety test on New Year's Eve, but Matt Burgess does it with such ease that you hardly notice how daring he must be. Janice Itwaru, an undercover narcotics cop with a few undercover personal problems of her own, has us cheering for her even as she makes many unnecessary – and hilarious – bad decisions. Her lives at the precinct and in her family's Queens immigrant community keep intersecting, keeping both the reader and Janice on their toes. The result is an insightful character study and an invigorating police procedural, a double dose of delightful writing that will make you think you got two books for the price of one.

[Ron S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breezy reading crime fiction with believable characters. The action and dialogue all roll along smoothly. The saints make mistakes and the sinners aren't pure evil, much as in real life. A reminder that "airport fiction" entertainments don't have to be stupid; those that enjoy realistic crime novels with some humour will enjoy spending a few hours with Uncle Janice.

[Steph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/rea...

In the protests following the grand jury verdict releasing Officer Darren Wilson from the prospect of a criminal trial, a white police officer in Portland, Oregon, bent down to hug a tearful black boy, and the moment was captured on camera. It was posted, then shared and reshared — this snapshot narrative of racial harmony a welcome balm for an uneasy country desperate for comfort.

The shot was staged, as it turned out, or at least highly suspicious, but that’s almost beside the point. Even if the moment was authentic, its virality smacked of something distracting, even dishonest — because the problem has never been that white people don’t hug black people enough; the problem is more deep-rooted and sinister, and stories of individual heroism and kindness don’t say anything about systematic injustice. This is a big country. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somewhere in one of our fifty states, a white cop were hugging a black child this very instant.

We have endless choices in the stories we tell and consume, and if we want to feel better about the world, we can pay attention to these little glimpses of individual kindness and let them fill our minds with the feeling that everything is more or less okay. Hell, if all we want is a stream of opiates to pet our brains into complacency, we can literally do nothing but watch videos of puppies all day, every day, for the rest of our lives. But the fact is, there are things that are seriously wrong with the world, and it’s self-deceiving and even somewhat selfish to ignore them in favor of feel-good clickbait.

In fiction, individual cop narratives tend to be more palatable than stories about the police system, too. Novels and movies and television shows offer hero cops by the dozens, particularly white male loner idealists with desolate personal lives. Back in November, I read three of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels in the span of two weeks, to prepare for a review of The Burning Room. I enjoyed them, but had a hard time reconciling my reading experience with what I saw in the world. Bosch manipulated suspects and circumvented lawyers, all in the noble pursuit of truth and justice, while police misconduct of the most ignoble kind dominated headlines across the country.

Weeks later, I devoured the first season of True Detective, in which hero cop Rustin Cohle beat people and broke into a home to obtain information. Cohle said that he could always tell when a suspect was guilty, and because he was a hero cop, I believed him and watched him rampage. Around the same time, Daniel Palanteo was cleared by a grand jury of all guilt in the videotaped choking death of Eric Garner.

So I’d been thinking a lot about cop stories and their messages and effects when Uncle Janice fell into my lap. And after burning through Matt Burgess’s brilliant, layered portrayal of the NYPD in Queens, I thought, weirdly enough, of Commissioner James Gordon’s line at the end of The Dark Knight. You know the one — “He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now”? Well, Janice Itwaru may not be a hero, but she’s one of the best cop protagonists I’ve read in a while — a fleshed-out, imperfect character who feels like she could exist in our current universe.

Janice is an “uncle,” one of a cadre of undercover narcotics officers working the streets of Queens. Unlike the rest of the NYPD, the uncles are all officers of color, mostly young, ambitious types looking for a fast track to detective. Janice is 24 and Guyanese, and has all the trappings of a perfect uncle: “Young, brown, from the city, no college, desperate to move up, single and childless, without anyone to collect her pension if she got killed in the line of duty […] a narco lieutenant’s dream.” She’s almost done with her 18-month uncle stint, at the end of which she is guaranteed a detective badge. But after 17 of those months, making buys and busting dealers, Janice is starting to get recognized. Overexposed, her buy count drops, and the Big Bosses take notice.

Her lieutenant gives her an ultimatum: make four buys by the end of the next month or get sent back to patrol, where she started. At the same time, a buy board goes up in the rumpus (the Queens Narcotics Division headquarters), putting silent pressure on all the uncles to up their numbers. They team up and trawl Rego Park and Archer Avenue, visit nightclubs and methadone clinics. They goof off at the office and drink together after hours. They’re a lively cast: Tevis, Janice’s partner, who tells long, instructive stories the others try to avoid; Gonz, the resident asshole; Puffy, her office crush; Fiorella, her friend and fellow woman, a tired single mother; and Eddie Murphy, who resembles the actor, and steadily maintains his identity as a movie star with deadpan hilarity, now working undercover.

Janice thinks of her fellow uncles:

These guys, all of them, they lied recreationally, professionally, to stay sharp, to stay alive. Habituated to misdirection and subterfuge, they kept mistresses and backup mistresses, until it got to the point where Janice couldn’t expect an honest answer if she asked about the weather.

And yet, they are, for the most part, pretty likable, their antics providing a fun rhythm to a novel that deals with some serious themes.

The uncles bust their fair share of bad guys, but they’re never really presented as good guys. Janice in particular is, if anything, an antihero, with a ruthlessly Machiavellian approach to her work. It’s easy enough to root for her when she’s going after the drug dealer guarding his stash with a pit bull; less so when she’s trying to rope recovering addicts at a methadone clinic into selling her their doses, pleading in a way that appeals to their kindness. With the buy quota hanging over her head, she proves a lot less interested in improving society than she is in getting her promotion. (“Please oh please, Janice thought. Be holding something, anything, a crinkled joint, a tab of Ecstasy turning to dust in your wallet.”) As the book goes on, she engages in increasingly reprehensible behavior, and her grip on her life deteriorates.

In addition to her work situation, Janice has to deal with a lot of stress at home. She lives with her mother Vita, a kind, anxious woman who is slowly succumbing to dementia. Her older sister Judith quotes Mother Jones and scorns Janice’s fascist job. When Judith comes to visit, she coaxes Janice into seeing her estranged father Brother, a now-sober alcoholic who used to beat Vita before leaving her for a white woman. Brother Itwaru’s desire to reconcile with his daughter forces Janice to revisit old resentments when she’s already drowning in problems.

In one dramatic scene at a daycare/dealer’s den, Janice comes across an emergency situation and springs into action in an attempt to save a child. It’s one of her more heroic moments, doing so much it seems “Janices filled the kitchen” — the narration splits her into all her different roles, acknowledging all the layered selves that exist in Janice’s body.

When Janice was 15, she served as the muse for her friend Jimmy’s comic book, featuring a West Indian crime fighter named Captain Richmond Hill. At the outset of the project, Jimmy asked her whether she wanted to be a superhero or a supervillain. She chose superhero, and she and Jimmy assigned Captain Richmond Hill an alter ego — Gabby Guyana, an NYPD homicide detective.

But of course, the choice between hero and villain was always illusory, something that only made sense in the world of a comic book. The real Janice is neither hero nor villain, but an amalgamation of nested and sometimes contradictory Janices — loyal and negligent daughter; loving and angry sister; good cop, bad cop.

Not for a second does Janice Itwaru loom larger than life. She is, in every scene, the exact size and shape of a flawed human being. When her actions become unsympathetic, she never claims exemptions; and in this way, even at her worst, she remains stubbornly relatable. Burgess doesn’t give us a hero cop, but by highlighting Janice’s humanity, he offers us something better: a cop story that may be fiction, but that nonetheless rings true.

[Sherri F. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audio version: 2 to 2.5 stars - I wanted to like this; and I tried and tried and maybe if I read the book rather than audio, maybe it would have been a 3 star. I liked the synopsis and idea behind this book of behind-the-scenes look at NY (Queens) undercover narcotic officers trying to make detective, esp. w/the lead being a multi-racial (half Asian Indian-half African American) woman w/a quirky family and crazy personal life esp. in a less serious/comical type of way. It had such good stuff to work with and so much potential to be good BUT it wasn't, all but a few squeezed out good spots or lines. It was like a week or month-in-the-life of an uncle. It's something that could work really well as a TV series, esp. w/good acting and voices. That was part of the problem with this audio, all but maybe the general 3rd person narrating voice and maybe 1 character's dialogue voice, the voices were bad. Several sounded the same and hard to differentiate between BUT most of the dialogue came across that they were very simple or dumb as doorknobs. While maybe a character or 2 were supposed to come across that way, they were not all supposed to be that way--and it's not that I'm from the South or West Coast or don't have first-hand experience listening to NY or Queens accents, b/c I'm just 1.5 hrs south of city, it just was pretty bad. It was just barely ok or so-so for much of it, but I kept hoping it was leading up to something much better then it would all be worth it and kept thinking it would at least rate, a weak 3 stars, BUT no it wasn't. I kept feeling like a child on a long car ride and instead of "Are we there yet?" I kept thinking "Is it almost over yet?" Usually, I multi-task while listening b/c I don't want to leave the book and/or I want to be distracted from my chores or PT/exercises. This time it was the other way around, I was looking for things to do to distract me, at least til it got good, but that didn't happen except maybe a few quick scenarios...too bad it was over Fri, Sat, & Sun. when I have less chores/PT than weekdays so at some point I was bored enough to go listen or read something else (several times). Like I said, it had some much potential and I would still like to see something like this out there...maybe if it was in 1st person from Janice's POV rather than 3rd person. Plus not all men write a women's POV well, so either do it from a man's POV or get a female co-writer!

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before I review Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess (audio version), I want to say that the reader, Rachel Fulginiti did a magnificent job with the voices of different sexes, ages and accents. I applaud her.

This is not a crime mystery but more a crime comedy and a realistic look at the lives of Uncles and Ghosts in the New York City police department. Janice Itwaru is an undercover narcotic officer. She is trying to survive the 18 month term so that she can be eligible for detective. She is half black and half West Indian. An uncle is the undercover person trying to make the drug buys to trap the dealers and the ghosts are the undercovers who sit in the car and observe and record what is going on. This is not a safe job. She learns some ways of avoiding putting herself in danger and she later learns that that the Police Department has its own brand of corruptness. She is not only trying to make it through each day at the job but she lives with her mother who has dementia. She has no real social life. By the time she gets home she had been through so much that there is not much to enjoy. Yet she sees plenty of humor in everything. There is humor in the dangerous situations, humor in the boredom, and humor of living with her mother.

Her father used to beat up her mother and drink a lot and he wants to have some kind of father and daughter relationship with her. He sees her as going down the path of alcohol and wants to stop her.
Her mother is very caring even to strangers and off course cannot remember things to save her life.

This is very gritty, there is some rough language, but a lot of perceptive statements and so very funny. I will miss my daily listening session with Uncle Janice Itwaru.

I received this audio book as a win from LibraryThing from the publishers but that in no way influenced the thoughts and ideas in my review.

[Josh Trapani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comparisons to "The Wire" (in a good way) are apt, if you were to transplant the show from Baltimore to Queens. However, as someone who doesn't read "crime novels" and yet enjoyed this one immensely, I wouldn't make too much of those comparisons. Uncle Janice is a literary novel that just happens to have its setting in Queens/the NYPD and its protagonist in Janice Itwaru, a young cop who wants to make detective. The story is not about solving a criminal mystery; it's about Janice growing, and in some ways growing up. Unlike "The Wire," where the personal stuff always seems an aside, the personal and professional sides of Janice's life are integrated in this novel. So much was going on in the novel that I realized that - like "The Wire" - I'd pick up more through reading it a second time. Full disclosure: I participated in a writing workshop last summer and Matt Burgess was the instructor. One evening he read some passages from Uncle Janice. I knew it was going to be a great novel, and it was.

[Susann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very glad I went to the reading and discussion of this at Astoria Bookshop. At first I bristled at how everyone kept emphasizing that this is a literary novel, not a cop/crime novel. Snobs. What's so wrong with genre fiction, huh? But they were right, because this is really about the happenings of someone's life during the first few months of 2008. The someone happens to be Janice Itwaru, an undercover narcotics officer in Queens, aka an uncle. And the drug buy & bust stuff is messy and interesting, but so is the rest of Janice's life and so are her choices.

Burgess' characters are real (my highest compliment), as are his descriptions and dialogue. He's very good with the details.

Not sure I'll get over the Mikey Sharpe bit. Not sure it was completely necessary. Yes, I get why Burgess included it, but damn. It's like that loose bit of wire from your braces cutting into your cheek.

[Rhonda Lomazow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Janice an undercover narcotics officer known as an uncle in Queens.This is a gritty funny portrait of these officers Janice hates her job hates the low life's she deals with her life is on the line daily but as much as she hates this world she is so close to her gold shield.i was drawn into the world of Uncles a world I knew nothing about I got so involved I didn't want to put the book down.a highly entertaining often funny look at a really grim world dealers pushers the users&the cops who deal with them.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

New Crime Star

Wow! This is one helluva book. Burgess can really write --not just good clean sentences but singing prose that jumps off the page. I read lots of crime fiction and it rare when something fresh and new appears like Uncle Janice. The best way to describe the book is that it's an updated 87 th precinct novel, like Ed McBain wrote , with a post modern tinge. But not too oblique or post modernist to render it too difficult to follow. I know I'm doing a bad job explaining the book so just read it. You'll love it.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burgess writes his characters in such an engaging manner that regardless of if they play a big or small role, the reader gets a back story that leads you to believe they are the most important person at that moment in the plot line, and you must pay attention. He's brilliant.

With that said, however, the only character I wish he would have expounded upon more is Mark Duckenfield. Perhaps a sequel?!

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janice Itwaru is an undercover cop (or "uncle") in Queens. While Janice works toward her detective badge, the pressure increases both at home and at work. Burgess effectively conveys the humor and frustrations of the undercover cop’s life as the story veers between gripping drama to comedy. The narrator for this audiobook was well chosen, making this an enjoyable listen.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun but unremarkable book that was made much more enjoyable by the fact that it took place in my neighborhood. So I'd read it on the subway, then get off at my stop and walk by the location of the scene I had just read. It was even more fun to find a few tiny errors about local geography.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Burgess's first Queens-set book, Dogfight, was a compelling story of a few days in the life of a teenage street hustler juggling various pressures. This excellent followup is a compelling story of a few weeks in the life of a young policewoman working undercover narcotics officer (aka "Uncle"), juggling various pressures. As in his first book, Burgess revels in the multiethnicity of the borough, and here his heroine is of Guyanese-Indian descent and works with a group of cops from across the ethnic spectrum.

This isn't a crime story or police procedural in any traditional sense -- the plot, to the extent there really is one, revolves around Janice trying to get promoted to detective. She joined the undercover narcotics unit based on the promise that anyone spent 18 months in it would automatically get promoted to detective, opening the door to work in other more prestigious units. However in her final month, a new metric is introduced, she must make four undercover buys that lead to arrest in the month or get kicked back down to being a uniformed patrol officer.

The book has two major strengths: Janice as a character, and the peek under the hood at undercover narcotics policing. To be sure, Janice is a deeply flawed human and makes plenty of bad decisions throughout the book, both professionally and personally. Some readers will translate that into "unlikability", while I saw it more as her being trapped by the impossible compromises of being an ambitious young (24-year-old) woman of color in a dangerous, male-dominated profession studded with unspoken (and sometimes contradictory) codes of behavior. She definitely doesn't act the way a reader might want her to act, and that's why she's a great character -- you're rooting for her and disappointed for her in equal measure.

Burgess must have had some kind of insider access or insight into undercover narcotics work, because the details are just too compelling. The tedium of cops walking the streets, one buyer and one "shadow", with a carload of "investigators" to do the actual bust lurking blocks away. I suspect most people will find the amount of time and energy it takes to make just one arrest mind-boggling and infuriating -- the sheer number of people it takes, the resources, the wasted time, the days sitting in the office watching telenovelas, etc. Not to mention the petty games and flat-out fraud being committed. Defund the police indeed...

Another major element is the sardonic humor of the book, with endless cop-banter and tales that may or not be tall. ("These guys, all of them, they lied recreationally, professionally, to stay sharp, to stay alive. Habituated to misdirection and subterfuge, they kept mistresses and backup mistresses, until it got to the point where Janice couldn't expect an honest answer if she asked about the weather.") Janice's own introspection is often rat-a-rat biting self-satire as well. At the end of the day, there's no strong plot to pull the reader along, so your enjoyment will rest entirely on whether or not you want to spend time with Janice.

[Matt Goncalves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was entertained reading this book. It had good humor, suspense, gritty realism, and an interesting story of the life of Narcotics undercover investigator. I don't want to give it full praise because the major plot points of the book don't occur until about two-thirds of the way through the story. There were some moments where the narrative felt disjointed in a stream of consciousness and abruptly switched from following the protagonist to another character that would've flowed better with some breaks in paragraphs (but perhaps that was just the edition I had on an E-Reader). The characters where unique and interesting to where I wanted to know more about them. I recommend this book if anyone wants a humorous and humanistic book about NYC police vs. drug dealers.

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book but not a great book either.

Not a boring book but not the greatest read either.

Not a book I just had to read or finish but also not a book I wanted to put back on the shelf right away either.

Not a must read but not a book I could just leave sitting around awhile either.

Not something I would have put on my list but not something I say I regret reading either.

It was a nice change of pace.

Not a bad listen. 3.5 decent stars. Not quite 4 stars but maybe.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Urban-American lit is not my usual cup of tea, but I was in NYC for 3 weeks and asked a bookstore employee for a mystery with an NYC setting. This fast-paced cop-on-the-street novel isn't a mystery but it is a crime novel and is set in Queens. It's well written and is a good story. Perhaps the ending leaves room for a sequel?

[Dawn Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fun read, even though I feel uncomfortable reading a police story these days. The publication date is 2015, so the story was probably written before police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson MO in August 2014. Over the past eight years our society’s view of police has changed so much I don’t even know what an acceptable cop novel would even look like now.

[Jacob Dzik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very entertaining cop novel. It almost feels like the author sat in on undercover cops and listened to how they talked and how they dealt with drug dealers. I really liked this book and can’t wait for what’s next from the author.

[Diogenes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly characters and not much plot. The banter, sharing the frustrations, dangers, thrills and boredom of police work was right on the mark. The style is entertaining and mostly brisk, but the promised humor was sparse.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Main character went to my high school, so I had to read it! 3.5 stars

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun read hope he makes a series for Itwaru.

[Denise · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. Entertaining, but not hilarious.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wanders around a bit, then gets to the point very late and does not flesh the point out very well. Ends with you wanting more because the story didn’t seem finished yet.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but not as great as "Dog Fight". Will keep reading his stuff.

[Kisha · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Havers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janice Itwaru, die Protagonistin in Matt Burgess‘ Roman „Cops“ (Suhrkamp Nova) ist ein Uncle, ein Undercover-Cop im Drogendezernat des NYPD. Ihr Einsatzgebiet ist Queens, der New Yorker Stadtteil, der durch seine große ethnische Vielfalt geprägt ist. Janice ist dunkelhäutig, wie die meisten ihrer Kollegen, die mit ihr auf den Straßen unterwegs sind. Das ist nicht weiter verwunderlich, wenn man sich die Rolle anschaut, die sie als verdeckte Ermittlerin dort spielen muss. Ihre Aufgabe ist es, als Drogenkonsumentin aufzutreten und als potenzielle Kundin in Kontakt mit den entsprechenden Dealern zu kommen. Wenn der Handel dann über die Bühne geht, nehmen die Cops des NYPD die Verhaftung vor. Und dafür gibt es Vorgaben, ein festgelegte Kontingent, das Janice erreichen sollte.

Sie ist ambitioniert und engagiert, arbeitet hart, um ihren Traum zu verwirklichen, Detective zu werden. Fast ist es geschafft, als sich ihr unerwartete Hürden in den Weg stellen. Zum einen werden mit einer neuen Vereinbarung die vorgegebenen Zahlen für die zu initiierenden Festnahmen in astronomische Höhen geschraubt. Das bedeutet größeren Druck und vielleicht auch die eine oder andere unvorsichtige Handlung, die dazu führen kann, dass ihre Tarnung auffliegt. Gefährlich für Leib und Leben. Zum anderen steht das 115. Revier, dem Janice angehört, seit neuestem unter Beobachtung. Es gibt es anscheinend Unregelmäßigkeiten, die die Internen auf den Plan gerufen haben, was die Arbeit auf der Straße natürlich auch nicht einfacher macht…

Wie bereits der Titel vermuten lässt, ist „Cops“ ein Polizeiroman im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Aber nicht nur. Es ist auch das Porträt einer Metropole jenseits von Glanz und Glamour, reduziert auf die elementarsten Bedürfnisse ihrer Bewohner. Und es ist die Geschichte einer jungen Frau, die täglich unvorstellbare Risiken eingeht, um ihren Lebenstraum zu verwirklichen.

Mich haben Burgess‘ Beschreibungen dieses Stadtteils bereits in seinem Erstling „Die Prinzen von Queens“ sehr beeindruckt. Er ist dort aufgewachsen, kennt die Straßenzüge, die Ecken, die Kneipen, die er sowohl dort als auch in „Cops“ im Detail beschreibt, wie seine Westentasche und zeichnet so das authentische Bild des Lebens in den Straßen von Queens. Aber auch die Menschen mit ihren Wünschen und Sehnsüchten und deren alltäglichen Überlebenskampf.