Triphammer - Hardcover

Triphammer is a veteran cop whose private life is gradually being consumed by his job. He doesn't care. The only things for him at home are booze and a teenaged son who is asserting his independence. But Trip needs the boy more than he can articulate. During the space of one winter Triphammer confronts the reality of his life with the help of an unlikely woman--a graduate student, victim of a domestic battering incident--who helps him reconcile his past life, give up drinking, accept his son's independence, and extend his mind beyond the limits he had thought possible. McCall has a talent for analyzing the male psyche. In this book he revisits territory touched on in his earlier novel, Bluebird Canyon (LJ 8/82), but with new insights as he probes the mind of an aging law officer in crisis. Highly recommended.
- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The hero's nickname in McCall's eponymous novel encapsulates both the virtues and failings of this likable but ultimately thin first-person confession. Triphammer, an Irish-American cop in Ithaca, N.Y., speaks in a vigorously direct, masculine voice, but his story overall lacks a lasting impact. The novel succeeds best in its gritty, often moving depiction of the human messes cleared up by the sensitive and decent narrator, and of his fiery but tender relationship with his teenage son and burgeoning romance with a younger woman, a damsel in distress who is also a Jewish academic. Triphammer reflects at length on the nature of police work and his dependency on alcohol. Too often the story reads like a self-help history of one man's confrontation with his drinking problem, failing to deliver the promise of its better moments. McCall also wrote Jack the Bear.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.