A Cold Case
   Philip Gourevitch
  2001 Farrar, Straus & Giroux
    ISBN: 0374125139


A few years ago a chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney's office was abruptly reminded of a 1970s double homicide of a friend from his youth along with another local man. The killer had so far eluded capture & aging Andy Rosenzweig resolved to track him down.

In a surprisingly intense & dramatic narrative, Philip Gourevitch recreates Rosenzweig's pursuit with a mesmerizing account of the killer's criminal personality & his decades on the lam.

A Cold Case takes us deep into the lives, minds & passions of two extraordinary men who embody opposing & quintessentially American codes of being -- that of the lawman & the outlaw.

Complete with black & white photos from police files & set in a New York that has all but disappeared, it is written with a clean, keen ear for the vibrant idiom of the people who once lived on its streets.

All about one man who is compelled to murder & another who is driven to hunt him. Not my usual fare -- I'm glad I read it, it brought back memories from another time & gave me a fascinating inside view of how a case is worked.

An astonishingly good reading, I gobbled it up without realizing how fast & furious was the telling of this long ago drama.

More from Philip Gourevitch: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.
(09/09/01)

Rebecca