Brass in Pocket (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) [Mass Market Paperback]

The book is in the timeline where Sarah has left, Brown is dead and Grissom is still in charge although he's away at a conference during the entire book.
From the title and the synopsis, I was expecting Brass to have a big part in the book. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. While he's mentioned throughout, he doesn't really make an appearance until the very end.

Catherine has a huge part in the book and the author did a good job with her. Actually with the exception of Brass and Grissom, everybody had about equal parts in the book.
If I had one bad thing to say, it would be there were too many cases. It was a bit hard to follow the facts of everything especially when Catherine seemed to have her hands in all of them. I don't know if that was done intentionally. It's possible it was intentional because the author put Catherine in charge and several times reference was made to the fact that she had no idea how Grissom ever got anything done because of all the responsiblities. So, I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt on that one.

As for the multiple cases going on... There were 4 cases I think. #1. Murder in a hotel room and a missing female victim/suspect. #2 Murder on a plane. #3 Missing girl. #4 Mass animal grave that may be the work of a budding serial killer. I think that was all of them. Like I said, it got a bit complicated.

Overall, it was a good book. Not great but good. I would buy another CSI book from this author but in all honesty, I would buy another CSI book from any author. I'm glad they're still writing them.

I love all of the CSI tv shows, so I began to buy up any/all CSI books like 'Brass in Pocket'. Usually, the books are well-written and informative and good. Unfortunately, this book does not make the cut. It has all of the fave characters in the book, Like: Catherine, Nick, Sara, Brass, etc; . However, the behavior of the characters in this book do not make sense or go along with the characters we know and love from tv. Overall, I was a little disappointed in the book.

Being a big fan of the CSI television series (only the Las Vegas one, of course), I wanted to give the tie-in novels a chance as well. My first effort, Ken Goddard's In Extremis, didn't turn out that well, but I wanted to give the novels a second chance. My eyes brightened when I saw the latest novel, Jeff Mariotte's Brass in Pocket. While I haven't been a big fan of Mariotte's (I didn't like the one Star Trek novel of his that I read), I didn't hold that against this book. It's a good thing I didn't, as this is a marvelous tie-in novel, doing everything it can to give the characters depth despite not being able to radically alter them. That's a mean feat, and something that Mariotte does very well.

It's a busy night in the crime lab. Gil Grissom is off in Washington at a conference and then a Congressional testimony, and the lab is very shorthanded (this novel takes place during the 10 episodes before William Peterson left the show, so after Warrick Brown's death). But murder doesn't wait until it's convenient, and three crime scenes occupy their attention. A brutal shooting at a cheap motel that may involve police Captain Jim Brass, who's not answering Catherine Willows' phone calls. A "locked room" mystery where a pilot lands a plane at a small airport and is discovered dead in the pilot seat, and a gruesome find of some animal bones as well as a recently slain sheep that may be the lead up to a serial killer. And then Catherine's daughter calls with her problems!

One thing I loved about Brass in Pocket is how much Mariotte uses the CSI characters we all know and love and does something different with them. He gives us some insight into how they think without treading on the toes of the TV show. He brings out a part of Brass' past (can't say what, as it's a spoiler) that adds to his character, though it's not a major enough addition that it transforms how we feel about the character played by Paul Guilfoyle. Since Riley's off the show now, Mariotte has a bit more freedom with her, and he gives her more depth than last season's episodes ever gave her. I loved her sense of humor and how she kept needling Greg, but she's got a darkness to her as well.

Another great thing about the book is how Mariotte ties at least two of the stories together thematically. The last thing Catherine needs during this busy time, where she's temporarily in charge while Grissom is away, is to have to deal with Lindsey's problems. But she feels guilty because her job keeps her away so often that she's very happy that Lindsey is bringing the problem to her. Her statements to her daughter about friendship and how we can only see the side of people they want us to see, even if they are our best friends, really ties into the Brass storyline. The other two storylines, while not necessarily tying together at all, are also very well-written and imaginative.

Mariotte does a good job with the "CSI-speak," all the technical terminology that we don't have to wade through on the TV show because we just see it in montage form. Goddard had a hard time making that interesting and it often dragged, but Mariotte doesn't have that problem. It did seem a little awkward when he was first introducing things like Luminol (for finding blood), but that's just a minor niggle. While the prose isn't stellar, it's very serviceable and interesting for a television tie-in. He kept me interested, which is the point of the whole process. His prose is also efficient, as he manages to fit a lot into a limited number of pages. Yet none of the plotlines feel rushed.

Dragging Brass in Pocket down considerably, however, is just how tightly packed it is, throwing the timeline completely out of whack. There is just no way that everything that happens in this book takes place in one night, yet Mariotte insists that it did. We have characters criss-crossing Vegas, going back to the lab, out to interrogate suspects, including an area of Vegas that used to be desert but is slowly getting taken over by housing complexes. Just to name one example, take the opening scene at the seedy hotel. We all know our CSI heroes are very thorough. They're experienced, so they can be quicker than somebody who isn't, but they are thorough. For the events in the rest of the novel to have taken place in one night, Nick and Catherine would have had to process that entire scene in 10, 15 minutes tops. Riley and Greg have to go out to the small airport (I assume it's kind of on the outskirts of the city), process the scene, figure out how the guy was murdered, drive to the second crime scene with the animals (a casino that's being built kind of on the outskirts of the city as well), process that crime scene, back to the lab, back to the airport to process the plane for evidence (where Greg gets interrupted by various airport personnel, who are also suspects, five times)...you get the picture. It's all impossible.

All of that really threw me out of the book, which is a shame because the rest of the book is so good. I read Brass in Pocket faster than I've read a book in quite a while, mainly because I couldn't put it down. I loved what Mariotte did with the characters, even those that he created. There wasn't a false note in the bunch. If you're a CSI fan and you want to see your heroes in action, you should definitely pick up this book. You'll be glad you did.

(Note: The book also contains an excerpt from Tokyopop's new CSI manga comic. This is completely useless because we don't see our heroes and it doesn't even set up what happens in the comic. Couldn't they have excerpted something from later in the comic that's actually interesting? I thought that was the purpose of excerpts like this, but I guess not)

Originally published on Curled Up With a Good Book © David Roy, 2010