Amazon.co.uk Review
"Every June 15th out at North Precinct, 'A' relief and graveyard shift started killing dogs. The police brass and local politicians only smiled if they were asked about it, shook their heads, and said it was just another one of those old myths about the precinct. The cops at North Precinct called them 'Night Dogs', feral dogs, wild and half-wild, who roamed the districts after dark. Their ancestors had been pets, beaten and abandoned by their owners to breed and give birth on the streets." That's the stately, carefully weighted language and metaphor that begins what James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss) calls "the best cop novel I have ever read." Of course, the "night dogs" are not only the roaming canines but also the people from the rougher neighbourhoods of Portland, Oregon--most particularly the police who work out of North Precinct. Seen through the eyes of a patrolman named Hanson, a Vietnam vet who thought he had seen the worst the world had to offer over there but is proved wrong every day, the story at first seems episodic, unconnected. But gradually all the threads of anger and pain come together to create an unforgettable picture of urban angst. Author Kent Anderson, who was a Vietnam vet and a Portland policeman in the 1970s, says that some readers might find his book disturbing or offensive: "The truth sometimes affects people that way." Then he adds a chilling footnote: "Things are much worse now than they were in 1975."
Product Description
The North Precinct of Portland, Oregon, is home to two kinds of cops: sergeants and lieutenants who've screwed up somewhere else, and patrol men who thrive on the action on the Avenue. Officer Hanson is the second kind, a veteran who has traded his bronze star for a badge. War is what Hanson knows, and in this battle for Portlands meanest streets, he's fighting not so much for the law as for his own code of justice. Hanson is a man who seems to fear nothing - except his own memories. And it is his past that could destroy him now: An enemy in the depart-ment is determined to bring him down by digging into his war record and resurrecting the darkest agonies of that nightmare time. And Hanson himself risks everything - his career, his equilibrium, even his life - when the only other survivor of his Special Forces unit comes back into his life. Doc Dawson is a drug dealer and a killer. . . but he's the one man Hanson can trust.
