Showing results by author "Robert K. Tanenbaum" in All Categories

Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Roger "Butch" Karp has been around New York long enough to realize that the judicial system can be dirty and cynical. But he still believes in justice. So when a vicious sociopath tries to dodge a brutal murder charge by convincing the court he is incompetent to stand trial, Karp teams up with firecracker Assistant DA Marlene Ciampi to unleash the full force of their relentless energy, hardboiled wit, and passion for the truth to put the killer away for good. They will accept no lesser plea.

Butch Karp has never shied away from a difficult case, and when Croatian terrorists hijack a plane and kill an NYPD bomb squad cop in a bomb blast, he’s eager to prosecute the high-profile killers. But Karp’s aggression puts him at risk when his investigations uncover messy government secrets. Certain elements of the FBI and CIA don’t want the trial to go forward, and are willing to go to extremes to sabotage Karp's case.

Assistant District Attorney Butch Karp is finally recognized for his heroic service to New York City when a group of politicians back him for the top job as Manhattan's district attorney. But a series of cases involving vigilante murders begins to reveal the true motives of those civil servants standing by his side. It's Karp versus the dirty city in one of Tanenbaum's most revealing and caustic legal thrillers - a stunning indictment of civil corruption and overreach.

After the New York grand jury indicts the national presidential campaign chairman and the NSA spymaster for the murder of the CIA chief, Karp engages in an unforgettable courtroom confrontation with the defendants who have the full weight of the US administration, a hostile judge, and a compliant media supporting them. These sinister forces will stop at nothing to prevent Karp from bringing out the truth, even if they have to resort to murder.

Butch Karp's career prosecuting New York's worst criminals takes a chilling turn when a series of ghastly child murders opens a window into the city’s hellish underworld. Karp and love-interest Marlene Ciampi pursue a psychopath known to his young victims as the Bogeyman, but what they find is more threatening than a lone predator. To stop the evil they unearth will take more than just courage in the courtroom; the two will need to follow a sinister trail into New York City's darkest corners, where the law is powerless to protect them.

When he goes undercover to bust mobsters who have infiltrated the sports world, Butch Karp glides effortlessly from the criminal courts he dominates as a prosecutor to the basketball court. Police have found the body of a pro basketball star in a car on the edge of the city, the glove compartment stuffed with cocaine. The investigation leads to a sophisticated ring of sports fixing and drug trafficking, and Karp's own background as a college basketball standout helps him close in on the crooks.

When a cop shoots down the son of a respected inner-city Baptist preacher, the community rises up in anger and demands to have the officer prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But there's something more than a call for justice at work here. There's a plot to bring down the city's police force through a conspiracy so vast and malicious that only Butch Karp, his wife, and his band of truth-seekers can untangle it.

When Dirty Warren, the criminal-court newspaper vendor afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome, is charged with murdering socialite Rene Hanson, Marlene Ciampi investigates. Marlene’s findings throw doubt on the case, but she is ignored by power-hungry and press-happy Westchester County DA Harley Chin, who is intent on doing whatever it takes to convict Dirty Warren, with the encouragement of powerful political forces.

New York District Attorney Butch Karp, recovering from an assassination attempt that came within a few millimeters of killing him, takes on a shadowy cartel that uses terrorists to further its criminal empire while sliding the United States toward a fascist state that the cartel controls.

Escape is a classic encounter between the forces of good and evil in human form that asks, and answers, questions of how to deal with supposedly "God-inspired" acts of murder and mayhem. In a riveting trial of garish courtroom confrontations, newly elected New York District Attorney Karp battles the "insanity of the insanity defense", as he tries to make Jessica Campbell, a rabble-rousing political science professor at NYU, pay for the murder of her three children. While Campbell claims that God told her to "send her three children to Him," it is up to Karp to prove that she was fully aware of the nature and consequences of her actions.

In Bad Faith, two gripping story lines that could have been torn out of today’s headlines meet at the intersection of religion and medical ethics. In the first, Butch battles to convict the parents of a deceased boy for failing to seek medical attention for their son, who believed, wrongly, that prayer was the answer for healing his rare but treatable brain disease. Meanwhile, a beautiful but deadly Russian incarcerated assassin, Nadya Malovo, works with Karp from behind bars to prevent a violent attack on New York City. But she harbors a secret vendetta....

When a promising actress from Spanish Harlem dies from a gunshot wound in the Tribeca penthouse apartment of an eccentrically famous Broadway producer, it is up to New York D.A. Roger "Butch" Karp and his hard-charging, crime-fighting wife, Marlene Ciampi, to champion the murdered actress's cause. Karp decides to personally prosecute the case and expose the "Big Lie" defense.

Prizefighter tough. Street-hustler smart. Pit-bull vicious. Longshoremen’s union leader Charlie Vitteli is like a cold-blooded villain straight out of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Busting heads on the docks of New York as a brash union organizer, taking no prisoners as the newest president of the North Ameri­can Brotherhood of Stevedores, Vitteli clawed his way to the top of the heap - and no one’s going to take him down now. Not if they value their lives.

Coal Country Killing revolves around the cold-blooded 1969 assassination of United Mineworkers of America "reform candidate" Jock Yablonski, and the murder of his wife and daughter in their Pennsylvania farmhouse. But driving the story are the extraordinary efforts of a special prosecutor and his "army" of investigators to bring the gunmen, the union boss who ordered the murders, and his henchmen who saw them carried out, to justice.

Months after a brutal double homicide in uptown Manhattan shocks the city, sensational newspaper headlines herald the arrest and indictment of Felix Acevedo, a shy Bronx teenager who confessed to the horrific crimes. But downtown, in the district attorney’s office, Butch Karp is seething. No sooner does he bask in the relief of successfully closing the case on murderous imam Sharif Jabbar than he is thrust into the center of a high-profile prosecution that threatens the integrity of his office.

When a former army veteran suddenly murders a colonel in New York, he claims that he had to do it because he was being used in mind control experiments. Surprisingly, a top Wall Street criminal defense lawyer, one with ties to the White House, decides to defend the killer, arguing that his client suffered from post-traumatic stress from his tours in Afghanistan and that it's his patriotic duty to assist him.

For Butch Karp, chief assistant district attorney for New York County, the nightmare begins when a shocking act of negligence results in homicide. Goaded by the media's sensational publicity, the public is screaming for blood, and the DA is listening. It is Butch Karp's unpleasant job to give the public what it wants - a thorough administration of hard-line justice - by prosecuting a poor, Hispanic, fifteen-year-old mother for murder. Complicating matters further is Butch's wife, private investigator Marlene Ciampi, who has decided to return to law.

Against a backdrop of Russian mobsters and corrupt lawyers, Butch and Marlene are on a mission to restore the system's lost dignity and bring the rapists to justice. All the while terrorists are at it again, planning to blow the roof off Times Square on New Year's Eve. Alas, the Karp family finds itself in lethal jeopardy, and to survive, they must team up and fight their greatest battle yet.

When a tremendous blast rocks an old school building in East Harlem during a meeting of the New York Charter Schools, killing six and wounding a dozen others, it's initially blamed on a natural gas explosion. However, as Butch Karp digs a little deeper, he discovers the explosion was the work of a mysterious serial arsonist in the employ of the teacher's union president, who is angry at the unqualified successes of the charter school movement in New York City and worried for the corrupt public school system.

New York District Attorney Butch Karp goes head-to-head with a crooked wannabe mayor, the rap underworld, and rogue churchmen in yet another pile-driving thriller in this New York Times best-selling series.