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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780312979515
ISBN number: 0312979517
Label: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 370
Printing Date: January 07, 2002
Publishing house: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Sale Popularity Level: 142694
Studio: St. Martin's Paperbacks
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The bestselling novelist and award-winning Hollywood producer weaves a high-tension novel of suspense around a chilling conspiracy of corruption within the LAPD, reminiscent of the classic movie 'Chinatown.'
Inside the department, they're called Tin Collectors: Internal Affairs Agents, the police of the police. If they catch you breaking the rules, they'll come after your badge. If they want you badly enough, they'll collect more than just your tin.
LAPD Detective Shane Scully is startled awake in the middle of the night by a call from his ex-partner's wife, who is being beaten by her abusive husband. Racing to their house to stop the fight, Scully ends up killing his ex-partner, a cop who is beloved within the department. Suddenly, Scully finds himself an outcast, shunned by his fellow cops who intend to exact vengeance no matter what the cost. Internal Affairs zeroes in on the 'renegade' cop with their sharpest young prosecutor, the ice queen Alexa Hamilton, who has her own reasons for taking revenge on Scully.
Desperate to save his career, Scully starts kicking over rocks within the LAPD. What he uncovers is pure evil: a conspiracy going to the very top that ultimately threatens not just his own life but that of a young teenage boy, Chooch, entrusted to Scully's care by his mother - Sandy Sandoval. Known as the Black Widow, Sandy is a beautiful and courageous woman who also happens to be the LAPD's most important undercover informant, and Scully will do anything to keep her son safe. Stephen J. Cannell combines mystery and violence, loyalty and passion in a tale with an ending as unpredictable as LA itself.
Amazon.com Review:
Stephen J. Cannell has written and produced enough TV cop shows to give him plenty of inside know-how about the LAPD, and recent events in OJ-land make the plot of The Tin Collectors--conspiracy, corruption, and murder by the boys in blue--more than credible. The tin collectors are the internal affairs cops, and they're out to make police sergeant Shane Scully the fall guy after he kills his former partner, Ray Molnar, in the midst of a domestic dispute that was just a click away from ending in the murder of Ray's wife. Not so coincidentally, she was once Shane's lover, a fact the tin collectors seize upon as evidence that Scully wanted the highly regarded Molar dead. As the wrongfully accused but redoubtable cop fights to clear his name, he discovers Ray's secret life: his other wife, his luxurious Lake Arrowhead home, and the ladder of corruption that reaches all the way to the top in the City of Angels. It should come as no surprise that this has TV-treatment written all over it. Read it now before it comes to a small screen near you, as it surely will. And applaud Cannell's growing ability to flesh out his characters with enough subtext and complexity to make a prime-time series starring Shane a strong possibility. --Jane Adams
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Rated by buyers 
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Stephen J. Cannell has got believable characters down pat...but they never get dull. The characters are hardly uni-dimensional. This book represents the stresses, complications, and corruption involved in the internal investigation of a police shooting but this one invloves one cop shooting another. No spoiler. If you like police/detective novels the Shane Scully series is for you.
Rated by buyers 
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I read a lot of thrillers, and I found this book highly entertaining overall. Stephen J. Cannell, who is mainly known for his television work, is a surprisingly good novelist. This is a well-paced novel of suspense, and I kept turning the pages.
The major downside of this book is the plot. This book starts as a realistic police procedural. LAPD detective Shane Scully is forced to shoot a fellow officer, and faces discipline from Internal Affairs. Cannell does a great job explaining this process. He obviously did a lot of research into the LAPD and its inner workings. In some ways, I thought this novel was on par with some of Michael Connelly's great work. The very first half of THE TIN COLLECTORS is very realistic and gripping.
Unfortunately, during the second half of this novel, Cannell pretty much throws reality out the window. This novel eventually turns into a silly "conspiracy plot" book where Scully does battle with his own Police Chief, the corrupt Mayors of two (!) separate major cities, as well as a major hollywood producer. Somehow, he single handedly brings all these people down, engages in some major gunfights, and starts a new romantic relationship in the process.
In other words, this novel ends up being kind of silly, like a dumb action movie. That's okay -- a novel doesn't have to be realistic to be entertaining. And THE TIN COLLECTORS is more entertaining that a lot of novels that I have recently read.
Still, I think that Cannell has the potential to write something better and more gritty than what I found in this book. I think if he set his mind to it, he could write something as good as Michael Connelly or Robert Crais. He hasn't done that with this novel, which is too bad.
Rated by buyers -
Shane Scully is awoken in the night by a phone call from ex-partner's wife. Ray Molar has gone over the edge, threatening to beat his wife to death. Scully goes to calm Ray down, but instead is forced to shoot Ray dead. Things snowball quickly. Ray was a hero-cop, a favorite of the chief of police and the mayor of Los Angeles. Scully had a history with Ray's wife. But Ray was also a monster, involved in something insidious and corrupt that implicates many of the city's prominent officials. And now Scully is a target of men who have much to lose, and few scruples. They've brought in Internal Affairs, the people called the "tin collectors" to pin Scully to the wall.
I grew up on a fairly steady diet of Stephen J. Cannell's television, "The A-Team" in particular. Looking back, it was a pretty silly show, but it was entertaining at the time. Nonetheless, I'd heard that Cannell's novels were a little more "grown-up." Intrigued, I decided to read his very first Shane Scully novel, "The Tin Collectors." While I think Cannell's writing skills have matured since the 1980s, I have to admit, my response to his very first book is not that different from my response to "The A-Team": silly but entertaining.
This is not to say "The Tin Collectors" is a bad book. It is very well written and plotted. Scully is pretty fully realized as a character, fighting a battle against various powerful forces arrayed against him that he's not sure he can win, but absolutely cannot lose. He will lose his badge and face murder charges if he does lose, and of course, that's what his unseen enemies absolutely want. Ray's group of followers in the department makes their intention to harm Scully perfectly clear. His own defender in the proceedings drinks too much. His prosecutor, Alexa Hamilton, is one of the best. She's prosecuted Scully once before, and lost. That's not going to happen again.
As Scully digs deeper into Ray's activities, he starts to get a sense of just how awful Ray and his cronies actually are. He soon realizes he has no choice but to seek help from the one person who has no reason to help him: Alexa.
Add to that, Scully has agreed to watch Carlos "Chooch" Sandoval, the son of a police informant. Chooch doesn't have a father, and Scully naively believes he might be able to bring some stability into kid's life. Naturally, Chooch is suspicious of this cop. Cannell creates some interesting moments of character development through the Scully-Chooch relationship.
Scully is completely sympathetic as he struggles to save his job and his life. Cannell tantalizes the reader with scraps of information. While there's never any doubt as to who is guilty, the how's and why's remain a maddening mystery up until the very end. The reader marvels at Scully's perseverance, and is angered at the corruption that seeks to destroy Scully (and implicitly, victimize the public). Cannell wisely makes sure Scully isn't too good and perfect. He's busted his own fair share of heads over the years. He isn't always the brightest bulb, although he's a solid cop, and he does have a strong moral compass. Even as Scully grows more desperate and does questionable things to get the truth, he is never self-righteous about bending or breaking the law. He simply accepts this as a possible cost of protecting himself.
That having been said, Cannell veers bizarrely off this solid foundation when the final conspiracy is revealed. Since it's the key to the novel, I won't spoil it. I will say that my very first response when the conspiracy stood revealed was: "That's ridiculous." But as I thought about it, I realized that perhaps it was not so ridiculous. First, I suspect Cannell was satirizing the Los Angeles/Hollywood community. The fact that an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is filming in and around police headquarters, and the extreme deference the movie gets from the city, tends to bolster this. Even though, I had to ask myself "Would a city official perpetrate all manner of crime just to achieve THAT?" While it seems unlikely, I have to think about some of the shenanigans that have gone on in my city. In a place like L.A., where image counts for everything and entertainment rules all, perhaps this book isn't outside the realm of possibility. Still, after the gritty, down-to-earth beginnings of this book, the ending does seem fairly goofy.
Cannell writes with amazing energy. I liked Scully, and wanted him to succeed. However, when he did succeed, it seemed a little far-fetched, which is why I can't quite give "The Tin Collectors" four starts. That having been said, I don't hate the book, and I am curious about other Shane Scully novels. Whether Cannell has written a smart satire or a silly action-adventure story, the end result is still a compulsively readable novel.
Rated by buyers -
i found this book on my bookshelf and read the back with prejudge disinterest. half the books i own, and there's a lot, were given to me by someone who was moving and didnt want the extra baggage. THE TIN COLLECTORS was one among many other cop novels, mysteries, and historical war novels.
from page one i was hooked.
Although it doesnt read in very first person, i got a sense of a well-developed character almost as though i knew the guy. the quick-paced plot, love-to-hate/hate-to-love characters, the twist and turns, and my favorite: the internal cop-corruption made me glad this was just the beginning of a SHANE SCULLY series.
THE VIKING FUNERAL sits half-read on my desk now.
Rated by buyers -
If you only read one book in the Shane Scully series, this book should be it! It offers a storyline unlike the same-old, same-old cop stories one gets used to.
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