Ten Spot: A Bobby Emmet Novel

by Denis Hamill

Overview

Ten Spot begins when the mother of three budding hip-hop prodigies is mowed down by a hit-and-run on a Brooklyn street corner, barely saving the youngest of her talented children, but their chance at a recording career is dashed. Only the peering eyes of the caustic Italian widow downstairs have any clue about what really happened. It is a murder that no one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, will ever forget, including the child who was saved and his older sister.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416584544
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	10/26/2007
Series:	Bobby Emmet Series , #3
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Denis Hamill is the author of ten novels, including two previous novels featuring Bobby Emmet—3 Quarters and Throwing 7's, as well as Fork in the Road, Long Time Gone, Sins of Two Fathers, and his Brooklyn Christmas fable, Empty Stockings. He currently writes a column for the New York Daily News, and he has been a columnist for New York magazine, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and the Boston Herald American.

Editorial Reviews

New York Daily News columnist Hamil plunges p.i. Bobby Emmet into the lurid world of gangsta rap, where he encounters nonstop violence, gratuitous sex and other staples of trashy crime fiction. Cookie Calhoun, quintessential downhearted frail, lives for her kids, and now a great day looms for two of them. Janis and Jimi Jim have formed Bigga Wiggaz, an act that's taken them to the finals of a climactic rap battle whose winner will be sent on a career-making worldwide tour. Sadly, it's a contest Cookie never sees resolved, for on her way to work a hit-and-runner kills her before the horrified eyes of Brian, her youngest son. Flash forward ten years. Convinced that Cookie's demise was not accidental, Janis and Jimi Jim hire Bobby Emmet to prove their point. Actually, it's gorgeous Janis ("so hot that Bobby half-expected steam to rise out of her taut, shimmering skin") who's the more convinced, insisting that they're facing a life or death situation. Brian, now 16, suffers from a case of survivor's guilt so acute that he issues a weird ultimatum: if they can't prove Cookie's hit-and-run was premeditated, Brian, burdened unbearably, will off himself on the fast-approaching tenth anniversary of her death. Bent cops, corrupt politicians and more of those steamy bimbos are all grist for Hamil's signature overplotting (Long Time Gone, 2002, etc.) as Bobby attempts to lift the veil on Cookie's crumbling. Shopworn stuff overall.

Kirkus Reviews