Slow Motion Riot

Steven Baum is a New York City probation officer nearing thirty who, unlike many of the colleagues around him, has not yet burned out. He still battles the city's bureaucracy on behalf of the people on his caseload. Then he takes on a teenage client already deep in the drug trade of the crack years, and their collision turns Baum's idealism into something closer to obsession and danger. Told in a fast, first-person present-tense voice, Peter Blauner's first novel grew out of the six months he spent as a volunteer probation officer while working as a magazine journalist. It won the 1992 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was named an International Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement.