FFB: Code Seven -- Lou Cameron

What we have here is a case of blurb writing gone hilariously wrong.  I don't even know what "crunching suspense" is, but I do know that this book resembles Walking Tall about as much as I resemble Charles Atlas (you whippersnappers can google that one).  And in fact the story has very little to do with the Mob other than the fact that the protagonist, Sean Costello, was a New Jersey cop who played it strictly by the book and therefore lost his badge and his job because he wouldn't play ball with the Mob.  Now he's a police chief in a small town in Florida, and that's what the book is about.

Costello's a busy guy.  He's dealing with an unidentified floater, a murder, a runaway who won't give any information, a supposedly harmless psycho who's first trying to kill himself and then stalking a young Cuban girl who's been taken in by the town's wealthiest woman, who's fallen for Costello.  There's also a jewel robbery, the possibility that the Syndicate is trying to start a drug trade in town, and all the ordinary things that cops have to deal with.

Cameron orchestrates all these plot threads masterfully, tying them up one after the other in satisfactory ways.  He wrote several standalone cop novels for Berkley in the middle 1970s, including this one and Barca, Dekker, and Tancredi.  All of them are quick reading and worth your time.