A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

by Charles Bowden

Harcourt, 320 pp., $24

In his second, semifictionalized book on the drug war, Charles Bowden follows undercover narcotics agent Joey O’Shay. O’Shay is a pseudonym, of course, as are all the character names. “Nothing has been fabricated,” Bowden writes. “The deals occurred. As did the killings, beatings, shootings, tortures, betrayals, suicide and love.” After this vow, he uses a distinctly gauzy lens to seduce readers into the intoxicating netherworld driven by brutality, sex, and greed, a hollow world that belies the surface gleam of life played hard and fast on the edge. In Bowden’s effort to craft this world, his writing frequently lapses into serrated-edged Haikus, inducing a catatonic response that rivals boredom. It’s not just the writing. Joey O’Shay is ultimately hollow himself, damaged, it seems, by his immersion in this world, but also by his own obsession with making the big deal. In this book, O’Shay is negotiating a multinational deal that would be his pièce de résistance. However, the deal loses its drive with frequent internal monologues presumably meant to make O’Shay endearing: remembrances of happier times, defining experiences as a young cop, and O’Shay’s secret hobby painting landscapes and nursing wounded wildlife. In his postscript, Bowden addresses the code of conduct writing about cops; the earlier reference to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning; and finally, an afternoon spent with O’Shay, witnessing his arrival at a place of understanding, declaring, “This is what this book is about.” Deriving this from the text, not the afterword, is preferable. – Belinda Acosta
Charles Bowden joins Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Cecilia Balli, Joaquin Jackson, Don Henry Ford, Luis Alberto Urrea, and moderator Robert Rivard on the River of Violence: Death & Drugs on the Border panel in the House Chamber on Sunday, Oct. 30, 1:45pm.

This article appears in Barbara Bush.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.