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Terry Orr #4
Hard Hard City
At his daughter's request, P.I. Terry Orr searches for a gifted teenage boy who has disappeared only to meet with unexpected violence and unexpected realizations about himself, his past, and his own relationship with his daughter.
304 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published September 23, 2004
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About the author
Jim Fusilli
50 books47 followersJim 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/.
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/.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 8, 2018
If you want to read crime/mystery novels set in contemporary New York City with interesting characters and plots, get yourself some Jim Fusilli. He's the perfect guy to write about this stuff: strong writer, familiar with the neighborhoods, lingo, cultural references, music, etc. His lead character, Terry Orr, is one of my favorites of the genre. He's a PI who has a little money from a previous gig and does investigations just to keep busy. He's educated but functions more as a blue-collar type of guy, divorced, with a steady 'girlfriend', and blessed with a daughter who's not only too smart by half but also has a collection of oddball friends. It's an entertaining cast.
Hard, Hard City begins with Orr taking on the task of tracking down a young man, an acquaintance of his daughter, who has disappeared. He'd been staying with a family friend and Orr discovers that coincidentally when the young man left some items in his friend's safe disappeared. One lead leads to another and Orr tracks down the kid's father, who it turns out is a big shooter in a rich Jersey town who has the local cops in his pocket. In typical Orr fashion he endears himself to them, resulting in an ass-kicking, and he returns to NY to try to figure out what's going on. Eventually he succeeds, but not before some considerable violence makes an appearance. The young man is located and the bad guys get justice, or at least an approximation of it. Through the course of the book Fusilli pushes the pace forward with his writing, which has a contemporary feel and oozes New York.
Fusilli paints great characters and I've thoroughly enjoyed each book in this series. Character development is very important to me and I tend to judge writing by how much I care about the characters and how well I can picture them in my mind's eye. On that criteria, Fusilli scores high.
Hard, Hard City begins with Orr taking on the task of tracking down a young man, an acquaintance of his daughter, who has disappeared. He'd been staying with a family friend and Orr discovers that coincidentally when the young man left some items in his friend's safe disappeared. One lead leads to another and Orr tracks down the kid's father, who it turns out is a big shooter in a rich Jersey town who has the local cops in his pocket. In typical Orr fashion he endears himself to them, resulting in an ass-kicking, and he returns to NY to try to figure out what's going on. Eventually he succeeds, but not before some considerable violence makes an appearance. The young man is located and the bad guys get justice, or at least an approximation of it. Through the course of the book Fusilli pushes the pace forward with his writing, which has a contemporary feel and oozes New York.
Fusilli paints great characters and I've thoroughly enjoyed each book in this series. Character development is very important to me and I tend to judge writing by how much I care about the characters and how well I can picture them in my mind's eye. On that criteria, Fusilli scores high.
February 6, 2010
This book 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.
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.
January 27, 2016
Terry Orr is a New York detective who has recently handed in his license after the tragic death of his wife and son. His wife had been unfaithful to him to an unknown man for unknown reasons, and Orr's pursuit of the answers had led to the disfigurement and institutionalization of an innocent man.
Orr, who has independent wealth through various investments and the royalties from a best seller, lives on in the aftermath of these events with his talented teenage daughter, still obsessing over his past and receiving therapy to try and keep a lid on all the anger.
That's quite a background for a series detective, and during this book, the fourth in the series, those events of the past constantly haunt him, stepping on and over the current narrative throughout. There is a helpful prologue which gives you as much of the background as you need, but there is no escaping the fact that I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I read the preceding episodes first.
As for Orr, his back story is his most elaborate feature, without it he was interesting enough but largely indistinguishable from a large cast of available types; more Travis McGee than Matt Scudder, though a bit of both, a little too saintly to be a Pelecanos protagonist, but with the same issues with regards machismo, communication and commitment.
In this book, the friend of his daughter asks him to look into the disappearance of the son of a rich, crooked Wall Street trader. Orr encounters a typical cocktail of upper-middle class arrogance and corruption, police officers on the take and large, psychotic goons to measure his own might and morality against. Fusilli handles hard-boiled trimmings with panache.
Not bad, but I realise I never gave it the best chance by jumping onto a moving train when the most dramatic scenery had already passed by earlier on the journey.
Orr, who has independent wealth through various investments and the royalties from a best seller, lives on in the aftermath of these events with his talented teenage daughter, still obsessing over his past and receiving therapy to try and keep a lid on all the anger.
That's quite a background for a series detective, and during this book, the fourth in the series, those events of the past constantly haunt him, stepping on and over the current narrative throughout. There is a helpful prologue which gives you as much of the background as you need, but there is no escaping the fact that I would have enjoyed it a whole lot more if I read the preceding episodes first.
As for Orr, his back story is his most elaborate feature, without it he was interesting enough but largely indistinguishable from a large cast of available types; more Travis McGee than Matt Scudder, though a bit of both, a little too saintly to be a Pelecanos protagonist, but with the same issues with regards machismo, communication and commitment.
In this book, the friend of his daughter asks him to look into the disappearance of the son of a rich, crooked Wall Street trader. Orr encounters a typical cocktail of upper-middle class arrogance and corruption, police officers on the take and large, psychotic goons to measure his own might and morality against. Fusilli handles hard-boiled trimmings with panache.
Not bad, but I realise I never gave it the best chance by jumping onto a moving train when the most dramatic scenery had already passed by earlier on the journey.
August 25, 2007
HARD, HARD CITY (Private Investigator-New York-Cont) – Ok
Fusilli, Jim – 4th in series
Berkeley Prime Crime, 2005- Paperback
PI Terry Orr's daughter, Bella, has asked him to find a talented teenager, Allie Powell, who is missing from the home of John McPorter, a family friend, along with $471 and some documents. When Terry goes to the boy's hometown in New Jersey he is first beaten and then nearly killed when his car is forced off the road.
*** The underlying plot in this story is one of family relationships; Terry's with his parents, his late wife and child, and his daughter and current girlfriend. The problem I had was due to not having read the previous books in the series. I didn't have a relationship with the characters or a sympatric understanding of their relationship with each other, which left me with a feeling of disconnect. The interjection of Orr's thoughts caused the flow to be choppy. Although the book was set in New York, the author didn't use the city to full advantage and it could have been anywhere.
Fusilli, Jim – 4th in series
Berkeley Prime Crime, 2005- Paperback
PI Terry Orr's daughter, Bella, has asked him to find a talented teenager, Allie Powell, who is missing from the home of John McPorter, a family friend, along with $471 and some documents. When Terry goes to the boy's hometown in New Jersey he is first beaten and then nearly killed when his car is forced off the road.
*** The underlying plot in this story is one of family relationships; Terry's with his parents, his late wife and child, and his daughter and current girlfriend. The problem I had was due to not having read the previous books in the series. I didn't have a relationship with the characters or a sympatric understanding of their relationship with each other, which left me with a feeling of disconnect. The interjection of Orr's thoughts caused the flow to be choppy. Although the book was set in New York, the author didn't use the city to full advantage and it could have been anywhere.
Read
February 5, 2009The multi-talented Fusilli, a music critic for The Wall Street Journal and NPR, is just as gifted at creating his own work as he is at dissecting that of others. With Hard, Hard City, Fusilli brings back Terry Orr, last seen in 2003's Tribeca Blues. Critics praise the nuance with which Fusilli imbues Orr__the character is layered like a human being, not a pulpy gumshoe__and the accuracy with which he captures New York City's dark underbelly. A few blanch at the plot's twists and turns, however, believing they skid into B-movie territory. Overall, most strongly recommend Fusilli's novel to both mystery fans and those who usually eschew the genre. As The Washington Post notes, "If you have fallen into the habit of reading the same favorites over and over__Grisham, Grafton, Sandford, whatever__branch out a bit. Live dangerously!"
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
February 7, 2017
Reviewers wrote that this was a great mystery. It is not. It is a bit of a mystery but it is mostly about the lead character whining to himself; am I good enough? did I say something wrong? when I said something wrong, was anyone hurt? Maybe that is what the writer wanted - a complete self-analysis from a biased view. The lead character makes so many mistakes and others rescue him at the last minute. I hope this is not a spoiler -- but you should know ---- just as a big brute is going to shot him or beat him to a pulp (the brute has a gun and the good guy does not), the brute has a red spot (like blood) on his shoulder and falls on the hero. Yes, that's right, a cop friend has been following him and shoots the brute just in time. Save your time and money.
September 5, 2011
More plot, less about the private eye's family troubles. I can appreciate the extended cast of characters, and how the various relationship issues make for richer characterization, but it doesn't make me want to turn the page. It didn't help that I had two books on the go over the same couple weeks: this one in print and an audiobook of Walter Mosley's The Long Fall. Both are similar in that they're about private eyes in New York, heavy on the character development, not so much on plot. Since I dragged out the reading of both I found myself confusing the two books when I got back to them.
December 30, 2007
Don't know what lead me to this, but I remember being disappointed. Couldn't wait to finish it and move on to something else...Sorry, can't recommend it..Probably a style thing.
June 27, 2014
The best part of this book is the playlist on the final page.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews