Laws of Annihilation

September 15, 2023
A white supremacist group seeks to stoke an all-out war between Jews and Blacks on the streets of New York after a Black teenager is fatally run over after being chased by Hasidic Jews for defiling their synagogue. The only hopes of preventing a possible Armageddon reside in the skills of Jewish FBI agent Janet Maclin, who is up against her own ticking time bomb in the form of Stage IV cancer, and a pair of police detectives known as the best closers on the force: Phee Freeman, a Black former New York Giant who is led by his emotions, and the cooler family man Quincy Cavanaugh. Plans to infiltrate the hate group fail tragically when a Black cop posing as a Harlem radical has his cover blown. At immediate risk are the lives of Spider Harris, the Jew-hating uncle of the dead teenager, and Ezra Pearl, the Black-hating grandson of a Holocaust survivor, who is blamed for the teen's death. Both are abducted by the plotters and tossed within yards of each other in a former slaughterhouse, with plans of using their tortured bodies to push tensions between Blacks and Jews over the top. La Salle does a good job of handling all the moving parts, which include Maclin's sense of personal doom (she participates in S&M sex to fight through her physical and emotional pain). But the depiction of the white supremacists never rises above stereotype. And in this, the concluding thriller in La Salle's Martyr Maker trilogy, there are long stretches of preachiness about the power of love and understanding (and babies). "What if he and Spider were in fact not that different, at least on the things that mattered most?" Ezra is finally led to think. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier did it much better in The Defiant Ones. A timely and engaging but ultimately predictable thriller.

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October 23, 2023
La Salle captures the racial tensions of contemporary New York City in his gripping third thriller featuring FBI agent Janet Maclin and NYPD officers Phee Freeman and Quincy Cavanaugh (after 2023’s Laws of Wrath). Maclin, who had hopes of becoming the Bureau’s first female director, learns from her oncologist that she has, at most, four months to live. Her first instinct is to visit her close friends Freeman and Cavanaugh, but before she can tell them the news, the officers receive word that Reform rabbis Israel and David Abramovitz have been found dead in their Manhattan synagogue with their hands and feet severed. The twin brothers recently attempted to cool down tensions between New York City’s Hasidic and Black populations following a Black teenager’s death at the hands of Hasids. The Abramovitzes were also vocal supporters of the city’s Black mayor, Rocky Henderson, who demands justice by any means necessary. Maclin, Freeman, and Cavanaugh launch a tense inquiry that La Salle, as is his trademark, takes pains to make plausible (as Maclin notes: “Good police work... was monotonous and nitpicking”). Thankfully, La Salle manages to get the details right while keeping his foot on the gas and making space to explore his leads’ inner lives. This series has yet to stumble. Agent: Rockelle Henderson, Rock Inked.