Uncle Janice by Matt Burgess

Published by Doubleday on January 6, 2015

Uncle Janice has been favorably compared to Clockers, at least by blurb writers. While Clockers is a better novel, I understand the comparison. The subject matter is similar, although Uncle Janice eventually travels in a different direction. More importantly, both books are overflowing with attitude. The dialog is often hilarious but it always rings true. The characters are multifaceted (although, unlike Clockers, the focus in Uncle Janice is almost exclusively on the cops rather than the drug dealers). The prose is vigorous and smart.

Undercover narcs in NYPD call themselves uncles. Janice Itwaru has been an uncle for 17 months but the drug buys she has been able to make are on a "downward slope," a trend that does not endear her to a supervisor who is all about numbers. Janice attributes her decline in productivity to the arrests that are made immediately after she makes a buy, exposing her undercover identity to the seller and eventually to the neighborhood. She is a month away from promotion to detective unless her declining statistics are used as an excuse to send her back where she started, wearing a uniform on patrol. Arrest quotas are illegal but Janice clearly needs to meet her quota. To do that, she may need to poach buys that should be made by other uncles. She may also need to charm young men into committing crimes that they never would never have committed without her persuasion. In that sense, Uncle Janice is a more realistic and insightful look at undercover drug cops than the heroic images that are served up on television.

Readers who do not like a book unless they like the protagonist may find little value here. Janice sees her undercover work as a stepping stone to a higher rank and a better life. She is not particularly admirable but neither is her job, which is based on using deceit to make pointless arrests. She behaves badly and protects her career by covering up her misconduct. I think that makes her realistic but others might find it difficult to warm up to her character. On the other hand, the time Janice spends dealing with her mother's dementia is a source of sympathy.

While Janice is far from perfect, she recognizes her failings. The novel gets its weight from a moral dilemma Janice faces when her failings force her to decide whether she will use the same tactics against dishonest cops that she employs to harass low-level drug dealers. Her resolution of that dilemma is clever if abrupt.

I admired the Matt Burgess' writing style here as much as I did in Dogfight, A Love Story, another novel that reminded me of Clockers. Even if Uncle Janice doesn't quite reach the admirable heights of Clockers (or, for that matter, Dogfight), I do not hesitate to recommend it to fans of crime fiction.

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