Long wait for justice

More than 1,000 people were murdered in New York City in 1970. Two of them were Pete McGinn, who owned a restaurant called Channel Seven, and his boyhood friend Richie Glennon, who owned a bistro called The Flower Pot.

They were shot by Frankie Koehler, a nasty piece of work from Hell's Kitchen, who immediately relocated to Florida and enjoyed 27 years of freedom. His diabolical liberty came to an end thanks to Andy Rosenzweig, chief of investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney, whose memory of the double murder was triggered as he drove past the former site of The Flower Pot on 6 January 1997. It turned out to be a true epiphany.

Rosenzweig, who describes himself as a "tiresomely methodical dot-the-is-and-cross-the-ts investigator", had known and liked Glennon.

He decides to reopen the case. It had been closed because Koehler was presumed to be dead. Rosenzweig has a hunch. Six months later Koehler, aka Frank O'Grady, is in custody. The manhunt is over almost before it begins. The same could be said of this book.

Gourevitch's first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, won several awards and deserved to do so. A Cold Case is just a magazine article padded out to look like a book. Indeed, the two pages of acknowledgements (bringing the total up to 188) reveal that "portions" have already appeared in The New Yorker. The rest - which features 13 totally blank pages, six with single quotations or headings, and seven pages of photographs - can be read in a leisurely 90 minutes. However, that does not mean they are not worth reading. After all, Elmore Leonard and Scott Turow praise them to the skies.

The cast is more compelling than the case itself. In addition to Rosenzweig, "Mr Need-for-Action", the reader is introduced to Murray Richman, Koehler's wealthy lawyer, who wears braces embroidered with the blindfolded figure of Justice. Gourevitch milks his "antic theatricality" for all it is worth - "Murder's my favourite," says Richman. "I love murder. Always one less witness to worry about" - but his views on the New York Mets are irrelevant and have only been included to boost the word-count. Gourevitch takes detours through the Sixties and Seventies to show that Rosenzweig and Koehler were both surrounded by bad guys in their younger days, but the tales of bent cops are well past their tell-by date. Gourevitch strains to find a significance that the story simply does not contain.

Koehler, riddled with "self-pity, selfevasion, self-indulgence, and self-deception", remains a thug no matter what his apologists say. His choice of mistress shows a certain sense of irony though: Dolores, who works in Leonard's Tot Shop, was a Jehovah's Witness until she was "disfellowshipped". Richman admires Koehler's "simplicity". His client receives a stiffer penalty for a gun rap than the two killings. He will be eligible to apply for parole next summer. So much for justice. Rosenzweig, meanwhile, has retired. He and his wife run a bookshop in Newport, Rhode Island. It is called "Book 'Em".