No Lights, No Sirens

May 2, 2005
Virtually every cliche in every noirish police melodrama ever filmed by Hollywood turns out to be the God's-honest truth, to judge by this pulpy memoir. Cea, a television writer who recently sold three network pilots, chronicles his former career as a NYPD officer during the 1980s, from his bushy-tailed academy stint to his soul-destroying ordeal in the "Badlands" of Brooklyn. His beat is a Dantean landscape populated by-in order of decreasing humanity-whores, crackheads, junkyard dogs, "scumbag" defense attorneys and Internal Affairs desk-jockeys who don't understand that you can't play by the rules when you're on the street. Cea soon finds himself "test-i-lying" to prevent perps from being sprung on technicalities and plying snitches with stolen heroin in exchange for information. The oft-scripted existential dilemma of law enforcement-"'to fight them, you have to BECOME THEM!'"-duly wrecks his marriage and sends him into a funk of paranoia and rage. Cea apparently has an exact recall of events and conversations from decades ago, but the lavish detail piles up more stereotype than gritty verisimilitude. He faithfully quotes every "yo" and "bitch" uttered by the trash-talking ghetto poets he encounters and arrests, and his reconstructions of his own lurid arias to the nihilistic honor of cops-"'a filthy toilet bowl full of maggots is what this city is....and the only ones who stand between the babies and the furnace are saps like me! ME!'"-go on for pages. Somewhere in here there's an intriguing account of gradual corruption and the weird psychological dynamic between cops and criminals, but it's buried beneath a hackneyed, overwrought screenplay-in-waiting.

June 6, 2005
Virtually every cliche in every noirish police melodrama ever filmed by Hollywood turns out to be the God's-honest truth, to judge by this pulpy memoir. Cea, a television writer who recently sold three network pilots, chronicles his former career as a NYPD officer during the 1980s, from his bushy-tailed academy stint to his soul-destroying ordeal in the "Badlands" of Brooklyn. His beat is a Dantean landscape populated by-in order of decreasing humanity-whores, crackheads, junkyard dogs, "scumbag" defense attorneys and Internal Affairs desk-jockeys who don't understand that you can't play by the rules when you're on the street. Cea soon finds himself "test-i-lying" to prevent perps from being sprung on technicalities and plying snitches with stolen heroin in exchange for information. The oft-scripted existential dilemma of law enforcement-"'to fight them, you have to BECOME THEM!'"-duly wrecks his marriage and sends him into a funk of paranoia and rage. Cea apparently has an exact recall of events and conversations from decades ago, but the lavish detail piles up more stereotype than gritty verisimilitude. He faithfully quotes every "yo" and "bitch" uttered by the trash-talking ghetto poets he encounters and arrests, and his reconstructions of his own lurid arias to the nihilistic honor of cops-"'a filthy toilet bowl full of maggots is what this city is....and the only ones who stand between the babies and the furnace are saps like me! ME!'"-go on for pages. Somewhere in here there's an intriguing account of gradual corruption and the weird psychological dynamic between cops and criminals, but it's buried beneath a hackneyed, overwrought screenplay-in-waiting.

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.