Breaking Blue

March 30, 1992
In 1935, Spokane, Wash., was in the sixth year of the Great Depression. Unemployment was high. Civilian Conservation Corps workers were arriving in droves from the East for the Grand Coulee Dam project. Crime was rampant, and a series of creamery robberies had the town on edge. Then, on Sept. 4, the Pend Oreille County town marshal investigating these crimes was murdered. The mystery of George Conniff's death went unsolved until 1989, when Tony Bamonte, sheriff of Pend Oreille County and a graduate student, inadvertently uncovered information that generations of police had conspired to keep hidden. Egan ( The Good Rain ), Seattle bureau chief for the New York Times, lumbers occasionally, but his account of the reopened investigation generally resonates with regional color. Bamonte's investigation of the killing started as scholarly research, but stepped up when ``a convergence of conscience and coincidence'' suggested that the marshal had been shot by a cop protecting colleagues associated with the robberies. In a deathbed confession, a cop revealed that the Spokane police were involved in more than ``a conspiracy of small corruptions.'' Egan evocatively resurrects the scenes and raw insensitivities of '30s police life in the region, from Mother's Place, the diner where cops plotted their heists, to the Hotel de Gink, where transients stayed.

May 15, 1992
In the course of preparing a master's thesis on law enforcement in Pend Oreille County, Washington, Sheriff Tony Bamonte discovered new evidence relating to the 1935 murder of Town Marshal George Conniff. Bamonte uncovered documents that implicated another police officer in the murder and also revealed a widespread cover-up by the Spokane Police Department. Already unpopular because of his confrontations with the lumber industry and his criticism of other law-enforcement agencies, Bamonte further angered the police community by disregarding the code that forbids going after a fellow police officer--"breaking blue." Tracking down witnesses who verified his suspicions, Bamonte turned his efforts to a search for the murder weapon, a gun thrown into a river more than 50 years earlier. The trail eventually led him to a final surprising discovery, which in turn was capped by an even greater irony. Egan, Seattle bureau chief of the New York Times, tells this remarkable story with a journalist's thoroughness and a novelist's ability to evoke place and character. The tale is rich in history and suspense and is recommended for all crime collections.--Ben Harrison, East Orange P.L., N.J.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 1992
More than 50 years after the night in 1935 when George Conniff, night marshal of the town of Newport, 47 miles north of Spokane, was shot down defending the Newport Creamery, Sheriff Tony Bamonte of Pend Oreille County struggled for months to bring Conniff's murderer to light. Egan, Seattle bureau chief of the "New York Times," follows Bamonte's investigation--initially, a part of Bamonte's master's thesis, a history of law and order in the sparsely populated wilderness of Pend Oreille County; ultimately, a search for answers and closure for Conniff's aging son and daughter and for Bamonte himself. Egan introduces true-crime readers to Depression-era Spokane, center of the "inland empire," home to Hoovervilles, xenophobia, and antilabor racketeering, where cops and cons dispense stolen dairy goods from a police hangout called Mother's Kitchen. Though Conniff was (like the prime suspect in his murder) a lawman, Bamonte's effort to solve his county's--and the nation's--oldest open homicide case meets obstruction from the Spokane Police Department, while active and retired police officers from across the U.S. attack the sheriff for "breaking blue." Although Egan psychologizes about Bamonte's past and present family situations too much, "Breaking Blue" offers telling portraits of both Spokane in the 1930s and the wilderness country of the Pacific Northwest into which various suspects disappear and also captures effectively the "eureka" moments in Bamonte's obsessive search for the truth. ((Reviewed May 1, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)