Someone is painting bodies on Philadelphia's Broad Streetone more boldly drawn chalk outline every time another life is lost to the violence of the drug wars. A sixteen-year-old dealer; a priest; a nine-year-old girl. The images pile through the summer and fall, moving closer each day to the doorstep of City Hall. Ofelia Santoro rides her bicycle over the bodies and through the dark, decaying streets of the neighborhood known to police as the Badlands. She is looking for her fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, who disappeared a month earlier. His father skipped two years ago, and she's been losing her boy ever since. Gabriel got his first job when he was twelve, as a lookout, spotting cops for the coke sellers working the car trade. Now he's a dealer himself, the youngest guy in the Black Cap gang, holding down the most dangerous corner and hiring his own lookouts. He feels guilty getting kids involved the same way he got involved, but he needs them, or he'll be caught. Gabriel tries to outrun the neighborhood, taking cover with a drifter who is the father he might have had. But Gabriel is already trapped, at the mercy of Diablo, the ugliest of the dealers, a man who kills for fun. Steve Lopez's plot, dialogue, and pacing are masterful. With searing precision, he portrays a world of evil so routine that its seems inevitable. Yet Lopez endows his characters with such humanity that redemption and radiance lighten this darkness. Third and Indiana is an extraordinarily compelling and powerful debut.
Industry Reviews
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Lopez captures the gritty urban landscape to perfection and humanizes even his most despicable characters. Gabriel is 14 years old and has run away from home. His mother, Ofelia, searches for him by riding nightly through the Philadelphia neighborhood known as "the Badlands" on a bicycle that he gave her as a birthday present, but which she had not previously used because she suspected that the gift had been bought with drug money. Gabriel began working as a decoy at 12, then graduated to lookout, and finally to full-fledged dealer for a violent man named Diablo, who shoots dogs with abandon. Gabriel soon makes the acquaintance of Eddie, a small-time musician who has just left his wife of ten years, and his two sons, for another woman and moved to a part of the Badlands where his mother owns a run-down building. His lover leaves him almost immediately, his wife threatens to keep him from seeing his children, and the truck he borrowed from a mobster in order to move had an electrical problem and burned up on the highway. When the mayor of Philadelphia dies and is laid out in the funeral home of an acquaintance, Eddie and a pal plan to stage a break-in and steal a large ring that they spotted on the corpse's finger during television coverage so that Eddie can pay the mobster back; Gabriel, in debt to Diablo and therefore in hiding, soon becomes involved. The many plots and subplots, centering on love or desperation or both, revolve and intersect at a fast pace. Lopez's real accomplishment here is his rich, layered evocation of a life usually mauled (by the press, on television) with the blunt instruments of sensationalism and crocodile tears. (Kirkus Reviews)
