Overview
Members of the oldest law enforcement agency in the country, the U.S. Marshals were once regarded as little more than security guards. Now they're on the frontlines of law enforcement. Their mission, made famous in the 1993 film The Fugitive, is to take down hard-core felons. In Deadly Force, Carsten Stroud leads us deep into their sometimes savage, sometimes darkly humorous world. Luke Zitto was stagnating in his job with the Witness Protection Program when his wife left him for one of the white-collar felons he was protecting. Reassignment to Fugitive Operations gave Luke a new beat on some of the country's meanest streets - it gave him his war. Now the fugitive Luke wants most is an icy and elusive criminal who raped a federal marshal, a woman Luke is close to, and may be involved in a string of other atrocities. How Luke, his colleagues, and local cops in Washington and New York pursue this man, sometimes risking their jobs in the political quicksand of the Justice Department, is a thrilling and provocative story of frustrations and hunches, finks and snitches, that leads to a tension-packed final takedown.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In a prefatory note, Stroud (Close Pursuit) states that his goal is "to illustrate very disturbing trends in federal law enforcement." In this account of the career, from 1991 to 1995, of Marshal Luke Zitto, he concentrates on Zitto's major case, the search for a rapist and multiple murderer who hacked his victims to death with a tomahawk. The odyssey took Zitto from the South Bronx to Washington, D.C., to Buffalo and ended in the suspect's capture. Along the way, Stroud cites innumerable instances of interagency battling (FBI vs. DEA vs. ATF vs. USMS) and interdepartmental turf wars (Justice vs. Treasury), from which only the criminals profited. In a concluding note, he takes a pessimistic view of future federal law enforcement, fearing the FBI (which he doesn't like) will swallow up the other agencies. While his thesis is well substantiated, much of Stroud's book is written in a novelistic style. (Sept.)Library Journal
Founded in 1789, the United States Marshals Service is the oldest law enforcement agency in the United States. In this book, Stroud (Iron Brave, LJ 11/15/94) attempts to provide an inside story of what a U.S. marshal experiences on the job. From the outset, Stroud states that names and places have been changed to protect those involved. The main character is Luke Zitto, a marshal whose life was changed when his wife and son left him for one of the witnesses in the witness program. The main antagonist, known as the Yellow Man, is a rapist and murderer who hacks his victims to death with a tomahawk. Although he sheds light on the dark and seedy side of a marshal's life, Stroud uses a diary format that is difficult to follow. Just when the author has the reader's attention, he shifts to another scene. Libraries would be wise to skip this book.Michael Sawyer, Clinton P.L., Ia.Kirkus Reviews
Stroud is back in his territory of true-life heroes and villains (Lizardskin, 1992; Iron Bravo, 1995) in this crackling story of a US marshal.Agents for Marshals Service, the least well known of the law enforcement agencies, are hell-bent on proving that they can walk the walk and talk the talk. In recent years, having been given the job of tracking down dangerous fugitives, they have gotten much more attention. The marshal at the heart of this book, Luke Zitto, carries the gun he took from a homicidal fugitive he helped bring down: It's meant, Stroud suggests, to be his talisman against the bad luck that seems persistently to follow him. There is, for instance, the loss of his wife, Margot, and his stepson: While Luke was working for the Witness Protection Program, Margot took up with one of the witnesses (a white-collar criminal), and she and her son pulled a disappearing act of their own. Loss seems to prevent Zitto from becoming close to anyone. His fellow marshals call him "the Snake" because of his cold, solitary nature (it comes in handy, though, when otherwise tough criminals have to be interrogated). Written like a screenplay, with frequent jumpcuts, a number of first-person passages, and too many one-sentence paragraphs, the narrative sometimes trips itself up by striving to be so very tough. But the record of Zitto's pursuit of two insanely violent fugitives—the Yellow Man, who kills with a hatchet, and Paolo Rona, a brutal rapist—is relentless and gripping. The large cast of supporting characters can be confusing, but Stroud keeps the action moving, and the portrait he paints of an aging, lonely lawman, although it's a familiar one, is poignant all the same.
Large doses of blood, guns, and creeps, served up with Stroud's characteristic mettle.