Cold Case

by Philip Gourevitch

Book Overview

From a prize-winning author and, in Elmore Leonard's words, "a knockout writer," comes a masterfully written and gripping tale of a determined investigator who reopens an unresolved case of double... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374125139
• ISBN13: 9780374125134
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 183 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

The power of brevity

The most striking quality of this book to me is its brevity. "A Cold Case" is a first-rate example of a writer exercising immense discipline, self-control and deliberation with the craft. The book contains powerful character studies & strong sense of place. It seems Gourevitch considered every word & allowed none in that didn't help forward his Spartan story. Beautifully executed.

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I don't like to leave things hanging and I thought it might make it a little less hard to retire if I got this thing settled. -Andy Rosenzweig, A Cold Case In this short but surprisingly affecting book, Philip Gourevitch examines just one "cold case", a twenty seven year old double murder that has bothered Andy Rosenzweig since it occurred. In 1970, after an argument in a bar, Frank Koehler met the two men he'd been in the earlier confrontation with and left them, Richie Glennon and Pete McGinn, dead on the floor of McGinn's apartment. Koehler then disappeared. Rosenzweig was just a patrolman then, but Glennon had attended his wedding, so the failure of police to ever capture Koehler was galling. In 1997, with his retirement just around the corner, Rosenzweig was on his way to the doctor's office and passed by the restaurant where the original argument had occurred, recalling, for the first time in a while, that Koehler had still never been brought in, Rosenzweig, by now the chief investigator for the Manhattan District Attorney, determined to finally close this case in his waning days on the job. This is an unusual kind of crime story. There's no mystery : we know who the culprit is in the first few pages. All the violence and most of the action takes place early on too. There's a little bit of courtroom drama, but it's mostly kept off stage. Instead, the book is mostly a profile of a few fascinating characters. Rosenzweig dominates the book's first half, a nearly perfect cop--honest, hardworking, and dedicated to the ideal of justice. It is his personal obsession with seeing that Koehler pays for the murder of Glennon that drives the story. He's kind of the positive version of Javert in Les Miserables. In the second half, with Koehler at last arrested and facing trial, it is the criminal who dominates. Frank Koehler, who had already done time for a murder he committed as a teenager, comes across as a cold-blooded killer, who, even now, in his 70s, contemplated shooting it out with the officers who came to arrest him in Penn Station or, before that, killing a cop a day until they agreed to stop pursuing him. In what Gourevitch says law enforcement officials consider a textbook depiction of the criminal mind, Koehler gives a videotaped confession in which he expresses no contrition about the original crime and seems to think he deserves credit for the killings he contemplated but didn't commit. But then, once he's imprisoned, Koehler shows a surprisingly spiritual side to his nature. Though Gourevitch, thankfully, never lets him off the hook for his violent past, he does show Koehler to be a more complex man than we might wish to believe. One particular facet of his personality that should give us all pause is that he appears to have modeled his behavior on that of characters in old gangster movies, like James Cagney. It makes you wonder what kids who learn their values from today's pop culture will be like. This latter part of the book introduc

Cop and Criminal: Clear Pictures

Frank Koehler is not a nice guy. A mobster of the old style, he had a fight with a couple of guys in New York in 1970, invited them to get together to end the quarrel, and shot them both. Everyone knew he had done the crime. No one knew where he was. Twenty-seven years passed, Koehler eluded capture, and the case was closed because someone had heard he was dead. It was a cold case, and in _A Cold Case_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Philip Gourevitch tells how the case became active again and how Koehler eventually was put in jail. The hero of the tale is Andy Rosenzweig, chief of investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney. He's a real good guy, the type of cop who won't goof off or take kickbacks. He got an itch about the old crime, started interviews again, found family members, and got his man.Koehler had been on the lam in Benicia, California, where he had a reputation as "New York Frankie," a ubiquitous and well-liked fellow who walked the streets, fished, sat around drinking coffee with the regulars, and could be counted on to help sick people and especially to scare wayward youths into better behavior. Flushed out, the sixty-eight year old Koehler returned by train to New York packing a semiautomatic. He was cornered at Pennsylvania Station, and considered mowing the cops down in a sort of Jimmy Cagney finish, but figured, "What's the point now? I'm old... I met some nice people on the train." He cooperated with investigators, and gave a videotaped interview which fascinates Gourevitch, "one of the classic portraits of a criminal personality." On the tape he seems to be taking credit for the murders rather than confessing to them. When the interviewer asks, "So you left the bar to get a gun?" Koehler insists, "Premeditated murder, yeah." For all his candor, he is unable to explain just why he had to kill Glennon: "I didn't _like_ this guy. He was an annoyance. I'm trying to explain it as best I can." Enigmatic and chilling are the many quotations from the interview._A Cold Case_ is a short book, but it packs a wallop in the intensity of its depiction of cop and criminal. Gourevitch closes Koehler's story with a jailhouse interview, in which the murderer admits, "They didn't deserve to get killed...I'll admit to that... What can you say if you do something real bad? Sorry? No, that don't cut it. I don't know what does." And Rosenzweig, in retirement, is running a book store called "Book 'em," and unable to stay away from his area of expertise: "I've sort of got myself involved in an investigation up here in Rhode Island... I'll tell you about it some year." We can hope so; in Gourevitch he has had a splendid listener and an enthusiastic reporter.

A must read for all true crime lovers!

Great look into the Psychie of a law enforcement officer. This book reminds me of another really good true crime book I just read: U.S. Customs, Badge of Dishonor. Both of these books demonstrate that once you get past the badge and gun, cops are just humans too.

Great character study about an obsessed cop

In 1970 long time criminal Frank Koeller kills two people. However, instead of making the arrest, NYPD inexplicably declares Frank dead and closes the case. Almost three decades later a partially obsessed NYPD detective Andy Rosenzweig manages to reopen the double homicide case and arrest the now elderly killer. A COLD CASE is based on a true story. There is no action to this tale, but the way that Philip Gourevitch manages to get inside the minds of the two prime players, Koeller and Rosenzweig, is incredible. This character study will provide insight to the inner turmoil of a veteran cop and the convoluted logic of a lifetime felon and murderer. As Rosenzweig asks "Who speaks for the dead"? Obviously not the Lorax or even most of society, but individuals like Mr. Gourevitch and Mr. Rosenzweig certainly do.Harriet Klausner