A letter tips off a Denver narcotics detective to a colossal smuggling ring
Once, Denver’s small-time pushers sold nothing harder than dime bags of bad California grass. But in the last year, heroin has appeared on the streets of the Mile High City, and the police department has responded by forming a narcotics division. Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants, in the hope that a small arrest could turn into a major case. After months picking up scraps, a stray piece of information is about to put Wager on to the biggest bust of his career.
A letter from the Seattle DEA says that an informant has named Denver’s Rare Thing Import Shop as a front for nearly a thousand pounds a week of smuggled marijuana. The case could make Wager’s career—if the smugglers don’t kill him first.
Review
“There is a toughness in this book, a hard-core basalt toughness, but there is also a leavening of human understanding (the life-in-death of a police informer has seldom been more impressively defined), and even a kind of battered charm.” —The New Yorker
“An excellent example of the police procedural genre, all the more noteworthy because it is a first novel.” —Marin Independent Journal
“For police procedural fans, a new star has risen in the West. Rex Burns’ The Alvarez Journal is superb. Absolutely authentic, absolutely gripping.” —Tony Hillerman
“Burns has created the quintessential American detective: lean, tough, and lonely.” —The Taos News
“A skillful and sensitive writer.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Among the best fictional police writers . . . [Burns] avoids clichés and provides us with good, intense narrative . . . within a truthful framework.” —The National Centurion: A Police Lifestyle Magazine
“Burns tells a good yarn with nicely etched characters, and never fails to make his setting an integral part of his story. While keeping his prose lean and sinewy, he paints a richly lurid portrait of Denver’s underbelly of vice and corruption.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“One of our best writers of mysteries.” —The Boston Globe
“Burns is a first-rate story teller with a keen eye for procedural detail and the Colorado scene. His characters are real and superbly drawn, Westerners in every sense, and he moves them skillfully throughout his story.” —Asbury Park Press
“[Burns’s] Denver is a gritty urban nightmare, finely re-created, decades beyond the Old West of Zane Grey and Max Brand. It's gone sleazy with a kind of casual violence that we associate with traditional fictional westerns.” —People
From the Author
When I wrote The Alvarez Journal, I had two goals in mind: 1) to write a realistic portrayal of a narc's job, and 2) to capture the feeling and quality of Denver in the 1970's so that later readers could say "this is what it felt like then." The immediate result was winning an "Edgar" for Best First Novel for 1976; the long-term success of the effort will depend on a future audience.
Description:
A letter tips off a Denver narcotics detective to a colossal smuggling ring
Once, Denver’s small-time pushers sold nothing harder than dime bags of bad California grass. But in the last year, heroin has appeared on the streets of the Mile High City, and the police department has responded by forming a narcotics division. Detective Gabe Wager and his rookie partner spend their nights trailing dealers, making buys, and acquiring informants, in the hope that a small arrest could turn into a major case. After months picking up scraps, a stray piece of information is about to put Wager on to the biggest bust of his career.
A letter from the Seattle DEA says that an informant has named Denver’s Rare Thing Import Shop as a front for nearly a thousand pounds a week of smuggled marijuana. The case could make Wager’s career—if the smugglers don’t kill him first.
Review
“There is a toughness in this book, a hard-core basalt toughness, but there is also a leavening of human understanding (the life-in-death of a police informer has seldom been more impressively defined), and even a kind of battered charm.” —The New Yorker
“An excellent example of the police procedural genre, all the more noteworthy because it is a first novel.” —Marin Independent Journal
“For police procedural fans, a new star has risen in the West. Rex Burns’ The Alvarez Journal is superb. Absolutely authentic, absolutely gripping.” —Tony Hillerman
“Burns has created the quintessential American detective: lean, tough, and lonely.” —The Taos News
“A skillful and sensitive writer.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Among the best fictional police writers . . . [Burns] avoids clichés and provides us with good, intense narrative . . . within a truthful framework.” —The National Centurion: A Police Lifestyle Magazine
“Burns tells a good yarn with nicely etched characters, and never fails to make his setting an integral part of his story. While keeping his prose lean and sinewy, he paints a richly lurid portrait of Denver’s underbelly of vice and corruption.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“One of our best writers of mysteries.” —The Boston Globe
“Burns is a first-rate story teller with a keen eye for procedural detail and the Colorado scene. His characters are real and superbly drawn, Westerners in every sense, and he moves them skillfully throughout his story.” —Asbury Park Press
“[Burns’s] Denver is a gritty urban nightmare, finely re-created, decades beyond the Old West of Zane Grey and Max Brand. It's gone sleazy with a kind of casual violence that we associate with traditional fictional westerns.” —People
From the Author
When I wrote The Alvarez Journal, I had two goals in mind: 1) to write a realistic portrayal of a narc's job, and 2) to capture the feeling and quality of Denver in the 1970's so that later readers could say "this is what it felt like then." The immediate result was winning an "Edgar" for Best First Novel for 1976; the long-term success of the effort will depend on a future audience.