- ISBN13: 9780312983437
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
If Detective Shane Scully’s best friend, Jody Dean, committed suicide three years ago, then who did Shane just see for one fleeting moment on the Ventura Freeway? He’s convinced it was his former colleague. Or was his mind playing tricks? Shane’s lover, Alexa Hamilton, herself a lauded LAPD officer, happens to think so. But Shane knows what he saw. And for a rogue cop with nothing left to lose, the search for Dean has become more than an investigation. It’s become an obsession.
The first clue to Dean’s secret life–and suspicious death–is murder. The victim is Dean’s former commanding officer. The connection taps into a corrupt, high-level conspiracy among L.A.’s finest that will put Shane and everyone he loves in harm’s way. It will cut deep into the heart of betrayal and the meaning of friendship. And it will dare one cop already on the brink of madness to take on step further into darkness…
Amazon.com Review
Stephen J. Cannell has taken to heart Raymond Chandler’s remark about writing crime fiction. “When in doubt,” Chandler advised, “have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” There are so many bullets flying in The Viking Funeral that readers might be forgiven for missing this author’s subtler efforts to fill out the dimensions of his series protagonist, LAPD Detective Shane Scully, introduced in 2001′s The Tin Collectors.
Nobody believes Scully when he says he’s just seen Jody Dean (his boyhood buddy and former colleague, who supposedly committed suicide two years before) speeding down a freeway. So the detective sets out to prove that Dean is alive, only to fall in with a crew of undercover cops who’ve slipped their leash and are now running a convoluted money-laundering scheme that ties U.S. tobacco shipments to South American drug barons.
Cannell, the creator of TV series such as The Rockford Filesand Wiseguy, certainly knows how to choreograph an action scene. But his dialogue is occasionally stilted, and The Viking Funeralloses some narrative steam during a lengthy tour of tropical hideouts. The story is at its best in illuminating the deceptive friendship between the emotionally scarred Scully and the arrogant Dean. Fans of The Tin Collectorsshouldn’t be disappointed. –J. Kingston Pierce
For more information: The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel
Related posts:
An anthropologist specialized in American lifestyle and phobias could find this book interesting, but, as a reader, it fails to entertain me.
I never pretended Mr. Cannell to be a philosopher, but his repeating of the same worn tricks is starting to chase me away from his literature. In particular:
-A strong derogative attitude against anything of Spanish cultural heritage in California. Mr Cannell never misses the opportunity of having many of his characters express disgust for the very use of the Spanish language!
His choice of verbs is suggestive as well: Spanish is never “spoken”: it is always “chattered”, “babbled”, etc. And it is always some sort of stigma that his characters of Mexican ancestry want to shed. This is by no means a central theme in Channell’s narrative, but it is annoyingly consistent to some degree in all her Californian novels.
(for what it is worth, ALL of the speeches in Spanish in the book have one or more mispellings. How hard can could have been to find someone to proof-read them?)
-Some story sections are being reused almost without variation from one novel to another. The whole psychological diagnosis of this novel’s bad guy being a “sociopath” had already been used almost to the letter, in “The Plan”. A leg wound in this novel (in the exact same place: the abductor channel, with the exact same anatomical consequences) had also being reused in previous novels.
-An unacceptably large percentage of the prose consist simply in telling us where the characters drive, in which boulevard they turn, what itinerary they take. Other than giving his potential readers from California some sense of familiarity, such morose descriptions of the characters’ driving habits has no bearing whatsoever on an already weak plot.
-The characters themselves are simply not believable. Chooch and Scully are not put in verisimilar situations, and (most importantly) they don’t react in a credible fashion to them.
-One almost constant feature on Mr Channell’s novels has been the male and female protagonists copulating in a more or less inexplicable and unexpected way in the middle of the plot. In “The Viking Funeral” this characteristic has been degraded a step further: they make love all along the plot, still in occasions totally unwarranted by the plot.
My advice is: unless you are an absolute, unquestioning enthusiast of everything Mr Cannell might ever produce, skip this one.
Rating: 1 / 5
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel
I keep a database of books that I have read over the past few years, and I have to say that out of 360+ books, ‘The Viking Funeral’ is the absolute worst. I can’t believe that this came from the same author who wrote ‘King Con’. Fortunately, ‘Hollywood Tough’ sounds much better. Even so, I’ll wait for it to come out in paperback.
Rating: 1 / 5
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel
This softback book was in fair condition when it was received. Front cover torn and creased, but all pages were very readable.
Rating: 3 / 5
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel
I have long been addicted to the police detective/mystery novels of recent years and found The Viking Funeral to be very disappointing. Lots of gratuitous sex and violence; an easily diagnosed plot and often poorly researched and constructed. Jonathan Kellerman, Patricia Cornwall Sue Grafton,and a few others are the masters of their craft, Stephen Cannell should not be placed in their category. I could not recommend this series to any devotee of the detetive genre.
Boris E. Meditch
Rating: 1 / 5
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel
While cruising the freeway Shane Scully sees his former LAPD partner and friend, Jody Dean in the lane next to him. He is shocked; Jody committed suicide two years ago.
So the detective sets out to prove that Dean is alive, only to fall in with a crew of undercover cops who’ve slipped their pasts and are now running a convoluted money-laundering scheme that ties U.S. tobacco shipments to South American drug barons.
Steven J. Cannell, the creator of TV series such as The Rockford Files and Wiseguy, certainly knows how to choreograph an action scene. The tightly constructed tale is occasionally stilted, but never dull. The story is at his best when describing the friendship between the emotionally scarred Scully and the ego-maniacal Dean.
Rating: 4 / 5
The Viking Funeral: A Shane Scully Novel