Freelance journalist Vincent Zandri was collaborating on the memoirs of a Sing Sing prison guard when he got the idea for a thriller about a warden who has to solve a crime to keep his job and his self-respect. This solid base of reality plus Zandri's lively writing give As Catch Can a definite edge.

Jack "Keeper" Marconi knows he's in trouble when a cop killer named Eduard Vasquez escapes from his Green Haven Maximum Security Prison in upstate New York after a trip to an outside dentist which he had approved. Keeper is clearly being fitted for a frame by his superiors in the state's penal system--men with whom he shared a baptism of fire as young guards during the bloody riots at Attica 26 years before.

Haunted by these ghosts of his former self and a time when justice seemed more clear-cut, Keeper goes off on his own to see who really helped Vasquez escape. Recently widowed and fogged by too much booze, Keeper could easily have become a rerun of an all-too-familiar genre icon. But Zandri makes both the man and job interesting and original by paying attention to details--from the way the weather affects the prisoners' behavior to the delicate balancing act that governs the relations between guards and prisoners. And there's more than enough creativity and research left over for a promised sequel. --Dick Adler