The Dangerous Edge

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Simon and Schuster, 1983 - Fiction - 411 pages
Daley (Year of the Dragon, To Kill a Cop, Prince of the City) takes his police-procedural savvy on a trip to a foreign place-and-time--to 1954 Nice, where a local cop doggedly pursues the US-expatriate mastermind of the ""heist of the century."" The mastermind is danger-loving WW II hero Lambert, a would-be playwright and sometime cigarette-smuggler who teams up with the Marseille ""Milieu"" to plan an assault on the Banque de Nice: in the novel's riveting opening chapter, Lambert and a dozen cronies (some Milieu mobsters, some free-lancers) ransack the bank's safe-deposit boxes, escape via sewer, kill an unlucky bum who sees them. . . and go their separate ways with divided-up loot. Then, while Lambert takes his quiet, beautiful French wife Jacqueline off for a sudden vacation (he tells her that he has sold his play to B'way), moody Commissaire Robert Bellarmine of the local SûretÉ branch starts investigating the bank-robbery. Bellarmine is pressured from all sides: the press; the government; and influential individuals (like the Mayor), whose deposit-boxes held embarrassing papers as well as cash or jewelry. The Nice/Marseille sleuthing turns up several of the dumber robbers--but little hard evidence, with no sign of ""The Brain"" who planned it all. (The Milieu manages to silence one would-be informer in a grisly blowtorch vignette.) Meanwhile, the restless Lambert once again virtually abandons wife Jacqueline, now investing his loot in a gun-smuggling scheme, but also planning some blackmail just in case: among the deposit-box spoils were pornographic photos featuring a US Congressman. And lonely cop Bellarmine, deserted by his showgirl lover, is attracted to sad shopowner Jacqueline, not knowing that she's married--until Lambert is at last tracked down and arrested. So, in the solid but predictable second half: decent Jacqueline is caught between her love for Bellarmine and her loyalty to a husband-in-trouble; Lambert uses those blackmail photos to get himself broken out of custody by the CIA; and the ruthless Milieu steps in to arrange some ironic killing. . . which frees Jacqueline for a happy fadeout. No surprises along the way--and, with Lambert an unendearing mastermind, there's minimal excitement about his fate. But since Daley handles all the details with gritty, deglamorized conviction--bank-procedures, interrogations, prostitute/gangster life--the unremarkable, rather slow-moving plot here is steadily, atmospherically engrossing. -- Distributed by Syndetics Solutions, LLC.

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Contents

Section 1
9
Section 2
11
Section 3
45
Copyright

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About the author (1983)

New York Times bestselling author Robert Daley is a native New Yorker who has written more than twenty books. His numerous experiences have found there way into his writing. He served in the Air Force, worked as publicity director for the New York Giants football team, spent six years as a European sports correspondent for The New York Times, and became the NYPD deputy police commissioner in charge of public affairs from 1971-1972. Since then, he has become a full-time writer. He and his French-born wife keep homes in Connecticut and Nice.

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