I have to admit, I was not expecting much when I picked up Central Park West, by James Comey, the former FBI Director. I felt there was a strong possibility the book would turn out to be yet another celebrity author gimmick. (Talking to you Marcia Clark and any number of children of famous authors seeking to cash in.) Maybe I’m just envious.

So, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find Central Park West to be an engaging legal drama. As most of you know (and if you don’t, you need to get out more), James Comey was the FBI Director who decided, for reasons still not well understood, to announce that he was investigating Hilary Clinton for improper use of an email account just weeks before the 2016 election—an announcement that seems to have hurt her prospects to become president. Trump won, instead, and proceeded to fire Comey for refusing to cave into Trump’s unethical request that he not investigate Michael Flynn for serious breaches of conduct with the Russians, etc.

In other words, Comey is not just any celebrity gimmick author. He’s controversial. This is probably good for book sales, though you have to admire Comey for being brave enough to write a book like this. He had to have known that the controversy surrounding him, and the fact that he is not respected on either the left or the right in American politics, could cause this project to blow up in his face.

I’m glad he wrote this book, though, because it gives him a chance to show that he’s more than a talking point. He writes well. The book is engaging and strongly paced. And, Comey has the evident talent to create characters you care about. A lot of “established” writers don’t do it quite so well.

After all that, what is this book about? The main character is a federal prosecutor named Nora Carleton, a woman in her early thirties who is “married to her job.” She lives in Hoboken, while her 5-year-old daughter lives with her mother and ex-husband. Nora’s life is a little complicated, but her main focus is putting away a mafia boss on trial for murder.

At the same time, the former governor of New York, a disgraced lech clearly modeled on Andrew Cuomo, dies after a female assassin poisons him with insulin. The killer looks a lot like the governor’s ex-wife, who is quickly arrested and put on trial for murder. Things do not look good for her, but maybe a miracle will save her.

The governor’s murder intersects with Carleton’s mafia case in a way that I don’t want to spoil for you. She and Benny Duigan, a larger-than-life investigator and general tough guy in her department, investigate both cases and find themselves in the harrowing hall of mirrors that is New York politics and its closely connected criminal underworld.

Most of the book features either courtroom scenes or the investigative exploits of Carleton and Duigan. He is the driver of most of the action, though. We get side servings of Nora’s personal life, but Comey is impressively economical with extraneous plotting.

The main attraction here is the behind-the-scenes legal wrangling that Comey knows so expertly. He takes you through all the byzantine plots, strategies, and petty rivalries that define the justice system in New York. That’s fun.

My only criticism is that the book feels slightly dated. The woman “married to her job” is a bit 1980s, as is the focus on La Cosa Nostra Italian mafia in New York, which I am pretty sure has dwindled these days. It doesn’t really matter, but it can be a little distracting. There’s some throwback humor, though, as the creepy, adulterous US Attorney is almost certainly a parody of Rudy Giuliani, a man Comey has reason to dislike, if you believe what you read in the newspapers.