Set Up: The Shocking Aftermath To The French Connection

by Robin Moore, Milt Machlin

Ninety million dollars' worth of heroin is missing, and somehow, rookie cop Day Palmer is in the middle of it. It's the same drug shipment last seen in Moore's The French Connection, stopped on its way from Marseilles to the streets of New York. Only now someone has stolen it.
There's no shortage of suspects, starting with the police themselves. Palmer is the only straight cop in a crooked precinct. His partner, Pancho Navarro, is dead, shot in Palmer's own car. The homicide department is calling it a suicide, but everything about it looks like murder.
Palmer starts asking questions, which only makes things worse. He is mysteriously transferred to Narcotics, to the most corrupt squad in a severely twisted department. His new partners, Cronin and Shulman, act as though they'd be happy to see Palmer join his former partner in the cemetery overlooking the Queens Expressway.
Meanwhile, the trail to Navarro's killers leads through Navarro's wife, Christina, a sultry contact who understands the deadly games being played-perhaps a little too well. And it's not too long before Palmer realizes he's being set up. But when a lithe D.A. named Sally Friedlander forces Palmer to wear a wire, he gets his chance to frame the framers, or die trying.
The Set Up is based heavily on fact, but to protect the innocent, names and details have been changed. In a new introduction, master storyteller Robin Moore reveals just what happened, and why. Every bit as exciting as its predecessor, The Set Up is a classic of suspense literature.

326 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1975

About the author

Robert Lowell "Robin" Moore, Jr. was an writer best known for his books The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U.S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit,The French Connection: A True Account of Cops Narcotics and International Conspiracy and, with Xaviera Hollander and Yvonne Dunleavy, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story.

Moore also co-wrote the lyrics with Barry Sadler for the Ballad of the Green Berets, which was one of the major hit songs of 1966.

At the time of his death, Moore was residing in Hopkinsville, Kentucky (home to Fort Campbell and the 5th Special Forces Group) where he was working on his memoirs as well as three other books.

During World War II he served as a nose gunner in the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying combat missions in the European Theater of Operations. Moore graduated from Harvard College in 1949.

Thanks to connections with fellow Harvard graduate, Robert F. Kennedy, Moore was allowed access to the U.S. Army Special Forces. It was General William P. Yarborough who insisted that Moore go through special forces training in order to better understand "what makes Special Forces soldiers 'special'." He trained for nearly a year, first at "jump school" before completing the [[Special Forces Qualification Course]] or "Q Course", becoming the first civilian to participate in such an intensive program. Afterward, Moore was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group on deployment to South Vietnam. His experiences in South East Asia formed the basis for ''The Green Berets.

Biography Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Moore

Reviews

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: from the files of the NYPD narcotics squad, the story of one of the biggest heroin heists in history, with corruption, ambition and greed.

[JohnM Koroly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dissapointing that Moore went for fictionalized novel of real-life events, but still an engrossing read. Fine narrative and detail of police and underworld. Some lurid passages should have been excised. Kind of an empty ending, but perhaps that's the point. This sort of thing couldn't be resolved neatly.

[Brett]

Non-fiction,Crime