Hoax, indeed

I don't know much about mystery novels. I only read one or two of them a year, and I rely on recommendations. This year I picked out two all on my own: David Hewson's Villa of Mysteries and Robert K. Tanenbaum's Hoax.
Even I knew, two chapters in, that Hoax sucks. It's the 15th or 16th book in the Butch Karp series, Karp being a New York assistant DA. One of his twin 11-year-old sons was blinded during a murder attempt and is now a musical genius; his pious daughter knows over 40 languages. His wife is - get this - a vigilante who once convinced a Vietnamese gangster to wipe out an entire town in West Virginia because its men were criminals. In Hoax, she's at an art-therapy center in New Mexico, licking her psychic wounds. Everybody in Hoax has a sh**load of psychic wounds. If it doesn't sound stupid enough yet, there's also the Pueblo police chief who calls every animal he sees "brother", the priest who kills young boys and buries them in the desert with rosary beads that have clearly come from NYC (they have St. Patrick's Cathedral stamped on them), and the good-hearted rapper from Spanish Harlem who gave up his wicked ways because of his Granny and a priest. There's also a cadre of "mole people" who lurk, Golem-like, in the NYC sewers and emerge every so often to root out evildoers in the dead of night. Throw in Karp, who wants to become DA just so he can clean house, and a sociopathic politician who's the spawn of his father and his sister, and this book can't get much more disgustingly cliched.
Oh, and there's one more thing: Robert K. Tanenbaum, a New York lawyer who briefly sat on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, didn't actually write the Butch Karp novels that preceded Hoax. His cousin, Michael Gruber, did. Based on the Amazon reviews, hardcore Karp fans were not at all impressed with the first Karp novel not written by Gruber, which was Hoax. Lucky me.