Larry Darter's Omerta appears to be the first novel in a police procedural series that features detective Howard Drew. In Omerta, Drew is the newbie, and he gets quite the introduction to being a detective by working alongside veteran Rudy Ortega as they try to solve not one but three different cases.
(Yes, Omerta is also the title of the third The Godfather novel, so don't get them confused. This is not that.)
What I will say about this novel is that it has potential - and a guy who sort of looks like Bill Pullman on the cover. Ha ha!
I received a free e-ARC of the novel back when it was first published in 2021. I'm hopeful that the novel was edited a bit more before its actual publication because there were some typos and some glaring errors - like a whole page when the author got a character's first name confused for the last name! (One of the victims is named Bailey Henry. Her parents go to visit the cops, and the author starts off naming the parents Mr. and Mrs. Henry. But then he spends a whole page calling them Mr. and Mrs. Bailey. *face palm*)
It was also a very "talky" novel, but perhaps that's just what "police procedurals" are like? The detectives obviously weren't there when the crimes happened, so we had to read about everything after the fact, which meant it was basically just a bunch of guys standing around talking, or sitting in an interview room talking, or talking on the phone. You get the idea.
Other things I wasn't wild about - an underdeveloped love story and the dialogue. Whenever I read a novel set in the present day and people aren't speaking in contractions ("isn't" instead of "is not", for example), it just rubs me the wrong way. It feels wrong and unnatural. And most of the dialogue in this novel felt that way, which is not good when talking is basically the only action!
I also felt the title was misleading. It refers to a mafia thing, and it relates to the first murder victim in the novel. It doesn't really have anything to do with the other cases mentioned in the novel. And spoiler alert - none of the three cases in this novel are related, which is something I was expecting based on other detective novels that I've read. This was basically a "Want to know what happens when you're an LAPD detective? Read this book!"
In the words of Randy Jackson, "That's a no from me, dawg."
Omerta is published by Fedora Press and is available to purchase. I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley.
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