Irresistible Impulse - Robert K. Tanenbaum

Irresistible Impulse is the second of Robert K. Tanenbaum's Butch and Marlene series that I've read, the first having been Falsely Accused. Both books are firmly rooted in the genre I like to call "just so happens to" novels. And that, unfortunately, ain't a good thing.

What's a "just so happens to" plot? Well, Tanenbaum's protagonists are a married couple, Roger (Butch) Karp and Marlene Ciampi, who have an eight-year-old daughter, Lucy, and a pair of one-year-old twin boys. Butch just happens to be a prosecuting attorney, head of New York's homicide division, and Marlene (an ex-district attorney herself) just happens to be principal in a protection service that specializes in shielding stalking victims -- a most honorable goal, by the way. Marlene just happens to be protecting a client whose sister just happens to be dating a doctor who just happens to have caught Butch's eye for a murder. Stuff like this happens regularly in the Karp/Ciampi household, so regularly that maybe Tanenbaum ought to try a different tack for a while.


Their (professional) paths cross numerous times in this, a novel that tries to tell these two disjoint stories and then bring them together with a surprise ending. In Falsely Accused, by the way, Tanenbaum strove to weave together the stories of three protagonists, with a pile of coincidences rivaling the national debt!


Mystery authors like Sue Grafton, James Lee Burke, and Rex Burns frequently weave together two seemingly disparate streams of action in a single novel. The best of those efforts reveal in the final chapter that the two seemingly different streams were set in motion by a single criminal action and are merely different tines in a forked plot. In Tanenbaum's novels (the two I've read, at least) the two plot lines involve seemingly disparate actions that are woven together by the fact that the two protagonists share the marriage bed. In a city of, what, 8 million people? it is pushing willing suspension of disbelief just a bit too far to have the reader believe that Butch and Marlene unknowingly become involved in aspects of exactly the same case almost simultaneously. Maybe in Thalia, Texas, but not in New York City. The frequent coincidences can only occur because, as we're told regularly, Karp doesn't want to know what Marlene's doing. Strange, though, we're never told that Marlene doesn't want to know what Karp's doing. Sorry, Robert -- it just doesn't work for me.


Tanenbaum can tell a story -- both plots (courtroom and P.I.) are interesting and provide a good read. He creates (mostly) believable characters, including the fascinating Lucy, who is "eight going on eleven, going on ninety." Butch Karp plays a fine role as doting father to his two boys even while prepping for the murder trial of his career. But the violent scenes that Robert Parker might create for Spenser and Hawk are here performed by a one-eyed, eight-fingered, 5-foot-three, thirty-four-year-old mother of three (who can still turn heads in a swimsuit). OK, I like V. I. Warshaski and Kinsey Milhone, neither of whom is a shrinking violet. And Marlene seems to like to sic her monster guard dog on stalkers and wife beaters, most of whom we feel in our guts deserve to be mauled a bit. But what I don't like here is that Tanenbaum's written an eight-year-old girl following in her mother's gory footsteps. Personally, I think that's just a little sick.

Recommended: No