Product Description

A brilliant true tale of crime and punishment in 70s Manhattan from the winner of the Guardian First Book Award In 'A Cold Case', Philip Gourevitch, the acclaimed author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, tells the story of a New York City cop called Andy Rosenzweig who, shortly before his retirement, became obsessed with solving a double murder which happened in the early seventies. There was a suspect, who had subsequently disappeared from the city, and although the file was not closed, no work had been done on the case for years. Rosenzweig, through skill and dogged persistence, eventually tracked down the suspect, Frankie Koehler, to Benicia, California, and after a dramatic stakeout arrested him at Penn Station as he was getting off the train to New York. A Cold Case is peopled with the colourful men and women of a New York City criminal milieu that has all but disappeared; its themes - murder and justice - are eternal.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #644683 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A Cold Case describes how Frank Koehler was only 15 when he shot a friend in the back for double-crossing him. That's the sort of guy he was--violent, mob-connected, and remorse-free. In the same rough-and-tumble post-war neighbourhood on Manhattan's West Side lived a very different young man: Andy Rosenzweig, rigorously straight and determined to become a policeman at a time when cops were more likely to be taking naps or bribes than nabbing criminals. Years later, in 1970, Koehler murdered two men after an argument in a restaurant. One of the victims was a friend of Rosenzweigs. It was a straightforward case, but in a typical show of the NYPD's ineptitude, the case was closed when someone decided to declare Koehler dead, allowing him to slip away.

Twenty-seven years after the murders, on the eve of Rosenzweig's retirement as chief of investigations, he reopened the case, determined not to leave without catching the murderer of his friend. Philip Gourevitch, who last examined real-life murder in the award-winning We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, is more interested in the personalities of killers and those who pursue them than the drama of murder itself. As a result A Cold Case is short on tension, but is an excellent character study. Gourevitch immerses us in the "white hoodlum milieu of another time and from a city which no longer really exists," and he conjures up the particular moral universe of each character--Rosenzweig; murder victim Richie Glennon, an ex-prizefighter who walked the fence between the good guys and the bad guys; Murray Richman, the Mob-defending lawyer from the Bronx who likes murder cases because there's "one less witness to worry about"; and Koehler himself, now elderly but still unremorseful. Gourevitch's skillful handling raises intriguing contradictions and questions, not least this one Koehler asks about himself: "Why would people still think good of this asshole?" Now, that's a story. --Lesley Reed

About the Author
Philip Gourevitch is the author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, which won the Guardian First Book Award, 1999, as well as the National Book Critics' Circle Prize for non-fiction and the George Polk Prize in the United States. He lives in Manhattan and is a staff writer on the New Yorker.

Customer Reviews

Absorbing but insubstantial
Gourevitch is a talented writer and here he tells a true story that can hardly fail to draw the average reader in: two men are murdered in New York in 1970. Their murderer's identity is known but he disappears and eventually the case is dropped. In the late 1990s an inspector who had known the victims and who is now approaching retirement suddenly feels compelled to seek out the killer and bring him to justice.
The book is a dual portrait, of the investigator and the killer. Each man is led by a compulsion to what he does, neither can really explain why.
The style is direct, factual and pacy, the author discreetly allowing the protagonists and supporting cast to speak for themselves.
In the end, though, we may wonder whether this authorial tact results from his having nothing much to add. He can't account for the men's actions and motivations either, and he doesn't really point the story anywhere: it happened, it was kinda cool - good guys, bad guys, and here are some real photos of them all - and then it finished. So?

OK as far as it goes....
After reading Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood', another journalistic depiction of murder, the reader was left wondering how, in such seemingly sober and straightforward writing, so much had managed to be conveyed about the lives of the protaganists and the country that had given birth to them. After reading Gourevitch's 'A Cold Case' I was left simply asking 'Why?'
Neither the central characters or the murder in themselves are particularly remarkable and Gourevitch's research sometimes borders on the banal, consisting simply in short interviews with the police and the convicted murderer and his relatives.
No new facts or facets of the case are observed and towards the end of the book page after page are given over to the tedious introspective ramblings of Frank Koehler, now in custody, reported verbatim from his letters to his lawyers. Writing of the criminal underworld he once inhabited he says. 'Very few people lived the James Cagney ideal. The more I got into it, the more I seen it, the more I hated it, and the more I hated myself.' This passes for interesting?
Gourevitch himself makes his sympathies clear with a sometimes sickeningly sycophantic and cliched portrayal of the detective hunting Koehler down, telling us he resembled Bogart, loved his job, was a stickler for facts and couldnt let a case go when he got his teeth into it. No cliche is left unturned in the authors relentless desire to portray the detectives involved as commited heros on the trail of a ruthless killer.
I didn't mean to be so negative about the book, but I feel its only fair to warn potential readers that this is a Sunday Supplement masquearading as a book and anyone interested in this sort of thing would do well to stick with Capote.

The good guy and the bad guy.
"A Cold Case" is a gripping profile of two men on opposite sides of the law: Andy Rosenzweig, a good cop and Frank Koehler, a cold-blooded killer. The title refers to a low-profile, long-buried 27 year-old homicide case that the system let slip through its fingers: a double murder of two men shot dead in cold blood in 1970 in New York by small-time gangster Frank Koehler. Koehler vamoosed and the case-file grew cold. Rosenzweig re-activated the case in 1997.

Gourevitch's book is unusual in so far as there is no mystery as to the identity of the killer which is known to us from the outset and no doubt about how the killings occurred. Gourevitch's focus rather, centres on building profiles of Rosenzweig and Koehler, the key players in the drama, opening up their minds and lives, tapping into the forces that drove these men to be who (and what) they are: Andy Rosenzweig, the dedicated cop; Frank Koehler, the "connected" hoodlum. Gourevich's portrayal of Koehler's criminal mentality and Rosenzweig's dedication to upholding the law, fascinating in itself, vividly depicts the criminal underbelly of New York as it existed in the 60's.