Sometimes it seems as if the 80s were the last wild years in so many cities around the world. The drugs, the gangs, the slums. From New York to London, across the Atlantic, certain neighborhoods became Comanche territory.
One need only remember the Bronx, with its average of two homicides a day in the mid-eighties ...
Perhaps that is why the author of this novel, Vietnam veteran and retired police officer Kent Anderson, has gone back to 1983 to enter a no less troubled city of Oakland.
Certainly Agent Hanson, in whose car we sit as co-pilots to patrol the city, closely resembles an alleged alter ego of the writer himself. Hanson is also a Vietnam veteran and has also served as a teacher. So if we add to all this the police profession typical of the novel, we begin to imagine a kind of autobiography or at least a narration of scenarios and situations recovered from the memory of this author.
And also in a certain way, it seems as if the author seeks to clear the conscience of some of those real characters that he met in the hard eighties in the less favored neighborhoods ... Agent Hanson smiles at problematic children like Weegee and somehow establishes a particular bond with one of the drug lords: Felix Maxwell. Thus the author can ramble on the motivations of evil, on the justification that a guy capable of killing may have to defend his black market.
Agent Hanson is a peculiar guy with his traumas and his shortcomings who ends up in love with Libya, a black girl. And when we discover ourselves tied by all those emotional ties that tie the policeman to the particular underworld in which he must patrol, the outbreak of violence shakes us in an unexpected way, hoping that good old Hanson knows how to make the right decisions so as not to end up succumbing. to the tragedy that is coming.
With certain reminiscences to Don winslow, Kent Anderson promises to become another benchmark of the police genre in our country.
You can now buy the novel The Green Sun, the new book by Kent Anderson, here: