ANGELA AMATO & JOE SHARKEY – Lady Gold. St. Martin’s, reprint paperback; 1st printing, October 1999. Hardcover edition: August 1998.

   From reading the biographical information about Angela Amato inside the back cover, one could easily get the impression (I did) that the story in Lady Gold could in large part be autobiographical. Her life story, in the guise of that of NYPD police detective Gerry Conte, could easily be “as told to” Joe Sharkey, a columnist for the New York Times, at least at the time this paperback edition came out.

   Angelo Amato, we are told, was an officer and a detective for the NYPD for over a decade. See above. Now a criminal defense attorney, she is in private practice in New York and Florida. In Lady Gold, Gerry Conte is in her last semester of law school. And the book reads like one of the most authentic police procedurals I’ve had in my hands in quite a while.

   Gerry’s primary function is babysitting a CI — a Confidential Informant — who’s the nephew of one Anthony Rossi, an underboss in the New York City Mafia. Trapped on some minor charges, Eugene Rossi has agreed to help get the goods on Tony, who in turn may help nab the real target, the top guy himself, Sal Messina.

   Working undercover like this is slow and often unproductive work, and the book often reads that way too. Flurries of action, once quite deadly, then long lulls of relative calm. Leads spring up, then fizzle out. Gerry’s problem, though, is of her own making. She gets too close to Eugene, whom she recognizes as illiterate and weak in the ways of the real world – so much so that the oral agreement he’s made with the D.A.’s office is not worth (as they say) the paper it’s not written on.

   Is Gerry too close to closing the line? Once Eugene Rossi has testified, if the case ever gets that far, he’ll be hung out to dry. No witness protection program for him, no matter what he’s been lead to believe. Is she a woman or is she a cop? In the male-dominated world of cops and lawyers, it’s not a good question.

   This is inside stuff that is going on in Lady Gold. All the details ring true. If the going is slow at first, stay with it. The pages of the last third of the book will flicker by in a blur.

PostScript. After Lady Gold was written, and with no other books to her credit, Angela Amato became a consultant for the NBC series Third Watch (1999-2005), and as Angela Amato Velez, wrote four of the episodes.

   From Wikipedia: The series was “set in New York City… It followed the exploits of a group of police officers, firefighters, and paramedics in the fictional 55th Precinct and Fire Station 55 whose shifts fell between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m, the ‘third watch.’”