Rating: 
Summary: incredibly accurate but uninvolving
Review: The story is told from such a lofty perspective that you never care about what is happening. Even the worst hood has some sense of importance and urgency to their lives. But Coyle and company are just presented here as vermin under a microscope.As for the vaunted accuracy of the dialogue, I believe this book does fall down a bit. It shows that there is very little variation between the club-tongued lower class dialect of Boston and Brooklynese. As a lifelong resident of the Boston area, I believe this is inaccurate. The only person I know of that has successfully captured the Boston dialect in the media is John Ratzenberger playing the Cliff Clavin character in the TV programm "Cheers".
Rating: 
Summary: 10 Pages of Greatness
Review: This book has a great reputation, particularly for the crackling dialogue, and I must say I was in complete agreement for the first 10 pages, which took me through the end of the brilliant first chapter. After that, you start to notice that everybody in this book -- the good guys, the bad guys, their wives, girlfriends -- _everybody_ talks exactly the same, some sort of blue-collar, Cliff-Klaven-meets-Edward-G-Robinson patois. It's lazy writing and the result is that the characters all kind of blur together. Tack on a "so what?" ending and you get a two-star book, plus one extra star for the first chapter, which really is terrific. If you like crime novels, your best bets are Ray Chandler, Jim Thompson or Joe Wambaugh. You may enjoy Chandler or Wambaugh even if you _don't_ particularly like crime novels. Thompson has probably too much of what Southey would call "the yell of savage rage, the shriek of agony, the groan of death" for the unsuspecting reader.
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