Author: Edward Conlon

Title: Red on Red

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Red on Red, the fiction debut from celebrated NYPD detective-cum-writer Edward Conlon, is dense, complicated, intense, and brilliantly insightful about so many things, it takes a long time to digest.

It's a novel that's more than a meal; it's a five-course, French prix fixes dinner. Conlon's Blue Blood, his memoir about life as a NYPD detective, was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This novel seems destined for similar circles. It has the ring of Dennis Lehane, featuring cops with noble intentions but wounded psyches, and the scope of a classic tragedy, even if it ultimately falls short of delivering such an intense knockout punch.

Red on Red becomes a success for its range and depth, not for the emotional resonance. It deserves the highest praise a fiction writer can earn: the third person narrative voice is so powerful, it forces the reader to consider the world on its terms, with its worldview, after the pages are shut.

To say Red on Red is about life as a cop would be like saying The Sopranos was about family life in New Jersey. Conlon's novel could be described in terms like "sprawling" and "epic," not because of the time or distance that it travels, but because of the psychological ground it covers. The novel is structured like a ride-along with two Manhattan detectives, protagonist Nick Meehan and his partner Esposito.

Beginning with a crime scene in upper Manhattan's Inwood Hill Park, Conlon's novel weaves its way through a web of cases, from gang violence to sex crimes, which eventually become interwoven both in the cast of characters they involve, and also in the way they burrow themselves into the mind of Meehan, a man who holds life at arm's length while he figures out how to make career, marriage, and identity coexist without allowing himself to be swallowed whole by the Herculean task of being a cop in the world's most dangerous city.

The plot of the novel takes its cue from the novel's title. "Red on red" is slang for cop-on-cop violence, both the physical kind, and that inflicted by the Internal Affairs Bureau, which Meehan points out on several occasions can get any cop at any time for any reason, if they decide they don't like you. Meehan opens the story tasked with digging up dirt on his partner Esposito, but the more time they spend together, the more Meehan realizes that while Esposito is  many things - among them unorthodox, an adulterer, and crude - he's not worth the IAB's time.

Conlon's writing is dense and intensely realistic, so whip-smart in its authenticity, so subtle in its revelation of plot twists that one realizes only pages after one has happened what actually went down. The cops talk to each other in their own language, one different from ours, and, mercifully, not one concocted by Hollywood screenwriters. Deciphering this code is only a surface pleasure of this novel. The deeper pleasure exists in probing the consciousness of the novel's two main characters, whose struggles, we come to realize, are not those only belonging to cops. The issues of love, loyalty, and lingering guilt race through every page, making us interested more in these than in the mysteries Conlon gives his detectives to solve.

Red on Red only slightly falters in its ability to manipulate these themes into truly universal accessibility. It is a massive work, only somewhat less than literature, but somewhere far, far above its brothers in the "cop genre" novel. Having mastered the memoir and the novel, where Conlon goes from here is an exciting possibility. His is a style and vision worth noticing.

*This review first published 4/20/2011