Powerful rendering of emotions, dramatic presentation of action, totally believable picture of political corruption (which is almost a redundancy anyway), "The Tin Collectors" is an astonishingly good beginning to a great series.
For anybody who, as I did, begins reading this series in the middle, that is, not with this Number One entry in the Shane Scully series, it might, and, in fact, most likely will, seem confusing. Lots of relationships change.
Yes, best to start with this Number One but even more better is to start. Cannell was one of our greatest story tellers. I strongly recommend "The Tin Collectors." ( )

I did enjoy some bits but was tuned out for a lot of it too, and don't think I missed much. I'll read another and see how that goes... ( )

Shane Scully of the LAPD gets a late night call from the wife of his former partner - she says her husband is going to kill her. He makes a mad dash over to their house where he finds his former partner in an alcoholic rage. After a struggle, Scully kills the guy with a return shot. An open and shut case of self defense. But things quickly get ugly and talk soon turns towards murder charges. Cannell, a tv writer as well, knows how to move a story along. ( )

I liked this novel about LAPD. It probably would be too passe for readers today (published in 2001) in the sense that it reads too much like a TV movie. Action takes place in downtown LA, Venice, Santa Monica, Long Beach, and Lake Arrowhead. There's even a throwaway character cop named Mark Martinez! Cannell wrote The Rockford Files, The A-Team, 21 Jump Street. This is probably why he got St Martin's Press to publish. They're still a big time name in the business. This story won't stay in your mind after reading, but it does reveal some nice twists. The story involves a cop who shoots a fellow officer. A recent unconnected LAPD case has come up again with officer Frank Lyga where he killed another officer. The story deals with Internal Affairs and police corruption tied to political corruption. I like books that describe Los Angeles since the city has changed so much since the 80s. Many of the travel times in the book would be impossible today due to car gridlock. Tin collectors refers (according to the narrator) to Internal Affairs officers who prosecute LAPD officers and take away their police identification shields. ( )

This gets two stars because it evoked in me enough curiosity about what was going on to persist to the end. But it certainly left me not ever wanting to read another book by the author.

For one, the prose is cringe-worthy. It uses epithets like "the beautiful raven-haired informant" rather than use the name of the character; it has intrusive speech tags like "groused" and uses punctuation like "!?" at the end of sentences. It indicates someone is Hispanic by spelling sentences like: Das allcha gonna haf? It ends on a maudlin cliche--more than one really.

But the reason I find it a pretty lousy novel lies at the heart of the plot. It's what's known as an "idiot plot" in terms of critiquing because it only works if the characters are idiots. In the case of the villains, as in so many "gritty" and "hard-boiled" detective fiction, they would have been free and clear if only they hadn't hung a "look-this-way" sign by doing things like persecuting the hero and machine gunning his home. In the case of the hero, Shane Scully, instead of going rogue, it would have made much more sense when opposed by corruption at the top of city government to either go to reporters--or, here's a notion--the Feds. It's rather what the Federal Bureau of Investigation and US Attorney is for, and a cop would know that. ( )