"Disturbed Earth" by Reggie Nadelson

DISTURBED EARTH from author Reggie Nadelson tells another story of New York City cop Artie Cohen as he trods across New York in the middle of media-frenzied panic over a series of child abductions.  He is summoned to a location where a set of bloody, razor-torn child’s clothes are discovered by a young jogger, Ivana Galitzone.  His boss, Sonny Lippert, who called him to the locale fears it’s the same serial killer of children uncaught years back.  Artie fears it could be his godson, Billy Farone, the young son of his cousin Genia.  And yet, the clothes discovered are those of little girl – not a boy.

So begins the tale.  I was hopeful, after the initial two chapters, DISTURBED EARTH was going to be one of those mysteries of the hard-edged, gritty NYC detective who knew the streets and knew how to pull abducted children from the clutches of those dragged their innocence down into sewer of the city’s worst.

There was an element of this Sam Spade type of addressing the reader, describing the street culture as he saw it; but once that initial intro of the bloody crime scene passes, any semblance of a plot begins to unravel. Cohen goes not on a fact-finding investigation to solve who the clothes belong to and what happened to the child.  He jaunts around New York basically just visiting people he already knows: his girlfriend, Maxine, Billy’s father, Johnny Farone, Johnny’s mother, and numerous friends who had no apparent connection to the crime – all the while, offering no clue to the hungry reader as to what is going on.

I’m waiting for some investigation.  Instead, Cohen is ‘chewing the fat’, ‘chillin’’, ‘hangin’ out’ with these people who have no apparent connection to anything outside of him; and, as a result, the story begins to drag.

Later on, I figured out – no thanks to Artie Cohen – the man was searching for his godson.  At the time, his inquires into where Billy was made no sense – as the clothes were identified as ‘girls clothes’ – and Cohen, again, offers the reader no sense of his intentions.  All I heard from him and his people was a lament on the decay of society’s fabric since 9/11 struck NYC and how similar America was to the former Soviet Union for the NYC Russian population, which is another thing I felt kept in the dark about – as a first-time reader of an Artie Cohen mystery, I had no idea the man was originally born in Russia until well into the book.

Any reader who followed the previous four Cohen mysteries might see things differently.  For this reader, that excessive use of esoteric information reading a difficult maneuver, causing my interest to continually get bogged down in a plot that would either stall on the Interstate, or trudge along at 30mph. 

I considered abandoning the hope for a plot to guide me through DISTURBED EARTH’s pages, thinking – maybe – the story was driven by theme.  Child abductions, 9/11, a heavy Russian population in NYC, a recalling of the former Soviet Union and the similar traits the Russian people saw developing in America – perhaps there was something in all of that I just couldn’t see.

If there was, I missed it.  It flew over my head and out of the ballpark. 

A plot did begin to develop, but I still felt the same detachment from Cohen I felt after the initial two chapters.  He wasn’t telling me anything, so I found myself as disappointed as a friend who wouldn’t open up to me about his problems.  I will commend the ending, as it was a complete surprise; yet, with no explanations as to why what happened in the end happened, DISTURBED EARTH remains a mystery.