On the morning of July 31, 1997, my brother Patrick and I were waiting on the platform of Brooklyn's Borough Hall subway station. We got there around twenty after eight, as usual, but the train was delayed for around an hour due to "police activity" -- a not uncommon thing, though unusual at that time on a weekday. When we finally got to where we were both doing clerical work in Manhattan, we learned the subway had been the target of Palestinian suicide bombers, both of whom were shot as they tried to set off their explosives when police stormed their apartment following the tip of an Egyptian roommate.

The incident left a number of unsettled questions that I've wondered about over the decade since. Were both men planning to blow themselves up, or was one man the mastermind, planning to impress terrorist groups back home with his actions? What exactly was their target -- one of the trains passing under the East River that day (my train, perhaps?), or the Atlantic Avenue Station as other reports claimed? What was the role, if any, of the mysterious Afghan landlord, who may have let them live there for free and was conveniently out of the country on the day of the bust?

I was pleased when Samuel Katz's Jihad in Brooklyn: The NYPD Riad that Stopped America's First Sucide Bombers came out in 2005, though I only managed to read it a couple of weeks ago. For obvious reasons, I thought that through this book, the only one dealing with the events of that day, I'd finally have answers to these and other questions.

I was sorely disappointed. Although Katz has an awful, rambling writing style, he also has very few facts to offer. Everything he knows about the plot itself he seems to have gotten from the newspapers. (He even cites the articles, though he seems to have read fewer than I read back in 1997.) Presumably he thought answering the sorts of questions I still wonder about was "getting into the heads" of terrorists, which he states in the Author's Note on page vii is a waste of time.

Instead, Katz wastes time with a poorly written paen to New York's Emergency Services Unit. Don't get me wrong, I'd enjoy reading a good book on the ESU, but this is not a good book. Katz is so bad at characterization that he uses stereotypes to describe the officers to the extent that it's difficult for the reader to tell one from another. Does it really help the reader to have it reiterated time and again that McCaffrey is the sterotypical Irish cop who would make a good poster boy for the Emerald Isle? The tough-guy front Katz puts on can only be attempted by cop groupies who don't know action themselves. The sloppy prose was for the most part a chore to read, but at times so bad it was funny -- I especially liked the mixed metaphor about being thrown into the lion's den to sink or swim. They must have been sea lions!

Trying to make this into an attack on Israel, he even drags Hamas into the fray, implying they held some responsibility. In reality, Hamas was cleared pretty early on -- while their propaganda was no doubt influential, and it does seem that Abu Mezer wanted to impress them, they got way too much money out of the U.S. at that time to be targeting the subways. If Katz had turned up actual evidence of Hamas having anything whatsoever to do with the bombing -- or even with training the bombers -- that at least would have been something. But Katz offers nothing, nothing beyond what came out in the papers -- that the would-be bombers were a couple of hoods from Gaza and the West Bank trying to prove themselves. I'd be very interested to know how much of this were part of the Islamic terror movement against the West which was just emerging and would become so much more fatal in Kenya just a year later, but of course Katz doesn't go into that.

In short, while Katz answers none of the residual questions about the bombing, he does write poorly about the ESU. This wouldn't have been such a waste of time if he'd instead written a book that was intended to be about the ESU, though his prose probably wouldn't have been any better. I'm left wondering about all the same questions that weren't answered in 1997 and glad that I only spent $1 on this book. ( )