FICTION

SLOW MOTION RIOT by Peter Blauner (William Morrow: $20; 433 pp.). New York Magazine writer Peter Blauner spent six months researching this novel as a staffer with the New York Department of Probation. The scars he received show in the character of his Steven Baum, a young probation officer trying desperately to hang on to his idealism against frightening odds in day-to-day contact with New York’s crackheads, muggers and sex abusers. It’s a job where cynicism is a given because it’s a game to violate your probation and then turn pious when caught. But it is when Baum finally encounters Darryl King, a young psychotic killer whose only ambition is to head his own crack organization, that he also encounters the first client who really scares him. With good reason. Darryl sees Baum as the only major obstacle in his climb to the top and the two are on a collision course in this fast-paced tour of a New York that is skin-crawling.