A decent police/crime mystery, focused on LA detective Turner. Gets a bit too bogged down in his personal life, which slows the action in trying to solve the major criminal case. Enjoyable, but nothing to write home about. ( )

Mike Turner is back in the second installment of Connie Dial’s police-procedural series centered around the Los Angeles Police Department. Turner is still assigned LAPD Internal Affairs, this time as part of special surveillance team. Doing a fairly routine surveillance, the team trips onto a group of corrupt and violent cops, using their badges to rob and murder. Turner, as before, may bend a few rules but only to put the bad guys away.

Dial fails to deliver on the promise of her first book with [The Broken Blue Line]. Her first-hand experience as a 27-year veteran of the LAPD grounds her stories well. But she is never able to flesh out a third dimension for her characters, especially her female characters. Dial’s first book, [Internal Affairs], spent a good deal of time focusing on a group of females in LAPD’s upper management, detailing their struggle for respect and success in the male-dominated world of law enforcement. Sadly, just like the first book, this one has only females cut from a watered down Mike Hammer novel. At least Hammer’s heroines and damsels had some grit and depth. Dial’s women are wounded, confused, weak, predictable and generally unlikable.

And, just like the first book, Dial’s experience only takes her so far. The details and procedures of the law enforcement world, especially how large agencies are managed, is dead-on. But the rest of the story seems designed to please an agent’s or editor’s demand for a more sexy and exciting narrative. [The Broken Blue Line] is the second book where Dial’s murderers are cops. And this time, she’s created a whole crew of psychopaths with badges. To be fair, you need only look to the history of LAPD’s Rampart Division to find murders and corruption. But the number of murderous cops compared to good cops in Dial’s world seems out of balance, and designed to thrill rather than capture any element of truth in story-telling.

So, as before, this a slightly better-than-average police procedural. Turner is an interesting and compelling hero, but not as well-fleshed out as he could be. And the story, while readable, is plagued by thinly created characters and a sensationalism that doesn’t jive with the any sense of reality.

3 ½ bones!!!! ( )

I read Dial's first novel, INTERNAL AFFAIRS, back in 2009, and was blown away by the authenticity Dial's experience as an LAPD veteran brings to a police procedural. THE BROKEN BLUE LINE (2010) is the follow-up, tracking Detective Mike Turner as he once again takes on corrupt cops in an Internal Affairs investigation. A cop on disability may be handling illegal weapons, and Turner and his team are brought in to close the case.

Turner is a tough, uncompromising cop who doesn't tolerate corruption in the ranks. He has a very noir feel, and Dial's language sometimes pays homage to the hard-bitten detectives of classic mysteries, with language like "He could feel his heart beating faster. The chase had started. In every surveillance, the prey always thought he could hide, outsmart the hunter, but he couldn't. Turner was confident that he and Miller were too good at this. They would slip and dodge until they followed Cullen and his partner to whatever it was Cullen was trying to hide." The noir mood isn't intrusive or satirical, just a nod to tough-as-nails cops and detectives in decades of novels and stories. In keeping with tradition, Turner's personal life is a disaster. He drinks too much and suffers horrible nightmares, and his sometime girlfriend moves back in to complicate things. His elderly neighbor moving in and his beloved but flatulent dog give him a complex, human feel.

Dial's work is filled with the details of police investigations and bureaucracy, seamlessly integrated into a gripping mystery. "Turner had taken the best notes all day, so he became the case agent - meaning he became the primary detective on the case and would be stuck doing the daily logs and all the legwork." Besides the day-to-day revelations, the bureaucracy is fascinating. Although Internal Affairs handles surveillance on dirty cops, there is a question of whether the case should be kicked to Robbery Homicide. While bureaucracy is not generally the most exciting part of a novel, Dial's knowledge of the LAPD's inner workings makes the "which department gets the case" discussion genuinely interesting. The case is a potential land mine, but it's also a potential career-maker, and Turner's bosses decide to keep it.

In Dial's world, and one assumes in the real world, no two cops are alike. Some are good people, just doing their jobs, but some are opportunistic and honorless. They use the job to get what they want. Some stick closely to procedure; others are loose cannons. This is true in patrol cops and upper management, men and women.

I've probably overused the word "authenticity," but really, Dial's experience and her ability to convey it in fiction set her novel apart from your usual police procedural. Like its predecessor, THE BROKEN BLUE LINE is an inside look at the LAPD and its police officers, and Dial doesn't shy away from criticism.

Source disclosure: I received a review copy from the publisher. ( )

The Broken Blue Line is a police procedural but the lead character works for Internal Affairs. Instead of focusing on homicides, sexual crimes or serial killers, we follow Detective Mike Turner and his colleagues as they root out the corrupt cops from the LAPD. While the book is interesting and unusual in its focus, I found myself mixing up the characters. While the book was interesting and well reviewed, it didn't grab my interest. ( )

It's going to be difficult to avoid sounding over-enthusiastic for this novel. Because seriously, it's very good. I haven't read this tight of a police procedural in awhile...years actually. Several factors make it stand out-hopefully I can articulate these enough to explain why this is a great book. So what's it about? A group of experienced detectives work with the Internal Affairs department to stop a crime spree organized by several lower-ranking officers. These have created a gang that stockpiles weapons and stolen goods and seems unhesitant to use violence against innocent civilians. Los Angeles is a complicated setting for such an investigation, as the freeway traffic and distance between key

locations serves to protect the gang and allow them an easy way to disappear into the city.

The Broken Blue Line has a complex plot with plenty of twists, yet the characters are built well enough to make it interesting. Many novels, especially a crime novel, sacrifice plot for character buildup or vice versa. This had an interesting balance of 'regular' policemen solving a crime: no hot shot renegade appears to solve the multi-faceted drama, but rather ordinary and somewhat average guys work together. Of course, there's the usual friction between top level brass and the detectives in the street, but the author doesn't let that sidetrack the plot. Best of all, even towards the end, when I usually can guess what will happen, I was totally surprised. This is because the author, Connie Dial, doesn't go overboard in foreshadowing events, so the tension is propelled forward in a concise, riveting pace that doesn't give anything away.

Another factor is that while the story takes place in Los Angeles, there is no celebrity angle, nor reference to the cliche LA stories that appear in movies or books (no Russian mafia, no Japanese Yakuza, or Chinese triad). The story is far more realistic and believable, most likely because the author is a former LAPD commanding officer with 27 years on the job. The level of detail and protocol is precise, and I appreciated more about the details of the officers level of dedication.

I think I especially liked it because, unlike many female authors who write crime, she doesn't make the story all about one fashionably dressed female character who butts heads with her ignorant male coworkers. In fact, for the most part, the main characters are all male. Three women, significant to the plot appear, but none are typical. The Patricia Cornwell books annoyed me, years ago, because it was always her main female character in conflict with her male colleagues in every single book. The Sue Grafton novels feature some interesting plots, but the wise-guy female character seems to depend more on wit and cutesy tricks than actual detective work. Then there are the ones who depend on layering their narrative with name-brands and emotional baggage that they feel are essential to make a believable female character. Lastly, there are some who are incredibly vulgar and/or gory, creating a book more known for being explicit than for a great plot. This story takes the male/female conflict out of the picture and makes it a complete non-issue.

It's a fast-paced read, with a satisfying conclusion. There were a few elements that distracted me: one minor and probably petty observation was that most of the characters have names of six letters and are very bland sort of names. I kept getting Connor and Cullen mixed up, and other similarities in the names of characters was a minor annoyance. At one point, there seemed to be a minor plot discrepancy that stopped me in my tracks going, huh? Lastly, the lead detective, Mike Turner, while wise on the job is especially knuckleheaded in his relationship with his ex-girlfriend who plays mind games endlessly. But in all, I enjoyed the little bit of escape it provided, and not having to dive into a bunch of gore was refreshing. It'd be a great movie! ( )