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Summary
Summary
"First rate suspense, with a soupcon of horror in the Hannibal Lecter vein... You won't be disappointed." --Stephen King
From Peter Blauner, the writer Dennis Lehane calls "one of the most consistently bracing and interesting voices in American crime literature," comes a new thriller about a lone young cop on the trail of a powerful killer determined not just to stop her, but to make her pay.
In the summer of Star Wars and Son of Sam, a Long Island schoolgirl is found gruesomely murdered. A local prosecutor turns a troubled teenager known as JT from a suspect to a star witness in the case, putting away a high school football star who claimed to be innocent. Forty years later, JT has risen to chief of police, but there's a trail of a dozen dead women that reaches from Brooklyn across Long Island, along the Sunrise Highway, and it's possible that his actions actually enabled a killer.
That's when Lourdes Robles, a relentless young Latina detective for the NYPD, steps in to track the serial killer. She discovers a deep and sinister web of connections between the victims and some of the most powerful political figures in the region, including JT himself. Now Lourdes not only has to catch a killer, but maybe dismantle an entire system that's protected him, possibly at the cost of her own life.
Author Notes
Peter Blauner is an Edgar-winning, New York Times bestselling author of several other novels, including Slow Motion Riot and The Intruder . He has written for such TV shows as Law & Order: SVU and Blue Bloods. A former journalist and lifelong New Yorker, his book, Proving Ground , was also published by Minotaur/St. Martin's Press.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Blauner's excellent sequel to 2017's Proving Ground connects two strong story lines-the discovery of a body washed up on a beach in Far Rockaway, Queens, and a trail of murdered women along Long Island's Route 27 (aka Sunrise Highway) that dates back to 1977. The case involving the body found on the beach-a badly decomposed pregnant woman with stones lodged in her throat-resonates with NYPD Det. Lourdes Robles, whose sister has been missing for six months. But as she begins to find connections between the killing and numerous murders out of her jurisdiction in Suffolk County, she becomes entangled with police chief Joey Tolliver, a charmer who has more than a few skeletons in his closet. The intertwining narratives-Robles's investigation and Tolliver's shadowy backstory-make for an action-packed and plot twist-laden thriller. Exploring such subjects as police corruption, misogyny, and racism, this is a page-turner of the highest order. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
They never should have let Ray Boy Calabrese out of the slammer. "A lot got washed away in 16 years," William Boyle acknowledges in GRAVESEND (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), but who knew that Conway DTnnocenzio was still bent on getting revenge for the murder of his brother, Duncan? All this time, Conway has been working a crummy job at a Brooklyn Rite Aid, brooding on the coldblooded crime and waiting for his chance to put Ray Boy in the ground. After coming up with a solid plan and even going to the trouble of learning how to shoot a gun, Conway confronts Ray Boy at his family's upstate summer house near Monticello. But before he pulls the trigger, Conway insists on hearing his brother's last words. "He went, 'Remember third grade. We were friends. Please don't do this,' " Ray Boy tells him, then breaks down crying. Although he's disgusted with himself, Conway can't manage to do the deed. Instead, he sticks Ray Boy in the trunk of his car and drives to Plumb Beach, where Duncan was killed, hoping for a shot of courage. But he still can't pull the trigger, so he leaves Ray Boy in the sand and heads straight to a booth at Murphy's Irish to brood over "shots of Jack and a two pitchers of Bud" with a worn-out cop named McKenna. Conway doesn't want sympathy; he wants a good kick to stiffen his resolve. But McKenna is determined to save him from himself: "I'm telling you, you're gonna live with Hell inside of you. It's gonna crawl up in you. Not purgatory. Hell with a capital H." Boyle chews the local dialect like a Nathan's hot dog, biting into the juices of pure Brooklynese and savoring the mustardy aftertaste. The sound is especially sharp coming from Ray Boy's 15-year-old nephew, Eugene, who wants to be "tough" like his uncle and adds "yo" to his curses. A neighborhood woman named Alessandra, a failed actress who's spent time in California, speaks with a classier accent, but after a few weeks at home with her widowed father, she's snapping her syllabic gum with the best of them. TALK ABOUT tempting fate! In DEPTH OF WINTER (Viking, $28), Walt Longmire, the laconic hero of Craig Johnson's Western mysteries, arrives in Juarez shortly before the Día de los Muertos, Mexico's Day of the Dead. Walt, who serves as the sheriff of Absaroka County back in Wyoming, is way out of his jurisdiction in "the real-deal Wild West" south of the border, but he's got an alarming reason to be there: His daughter, Cady, has been kidnapped by Tomás Bidarte, the sadistic head of a drug cartel, who plans to auction her off for sport - and to settle a score with her father. Johnson gives Walt a voice as dry as desert dust. "This was a strange land for me," he says of the harsh back country where he's tracked down Bidarte, "and strangely enough I liked it." A man's man, Johnson can be eloquent about both the beauty of a sunrise and the sadness of a woman in an isolated village who sees what Walt is reading and confesses, "I miss books - tell me about it." But he also has fun teasing his principled hero about his resemblance to a pro football player, which gets him star treatment in the middle of a raucous street parade. "you won't catch it." That's what Edie Beckett's therapist keeps telling her in Kate Moretti's morbid IN HER BONES (Atria, paper, $16). But with her mother, Lilith, on death row for murdering six women, it's understandable that Edie would be hesitant to peer too deeply into her gene pool. Unable to quiet her fears ("Am I like her?"), she follows an online forum called "Healing Hope," intended for victims of violent crimes, and develops an unhealthy obsession with the children of her mother's victims. At first, she stalks them silently online and finds that "the hunt thrilled me." But she goes too far when she seduces one of them and becomes the chief suspect when he's murdered. Moretti pulls some tricky tricks when she sends Edie on the run, where she slips in and out of some neat disguises and suffers just enough to satisfy the most judgmental reader. when a woman's decomposing body washes up on the beach at Far Rockaway in Peter Blauner's nifty police procedural, SUNRISE HIGHWAY (Minotaur, $27.99), Detective Lourdes Robles of the Queens Homicide Task Force instantly spots what the guys don't even notice: The woman was pregnant. "There was a collection of small brittle bones between the fingers," we're told, "almost like the victim was trying to hold onto a fragile little bird." The pregnancy doesn't contribute to the subsequent homicide investigation into the murders of six young women over the past 15 years, but it does make clear why Robles is such a good cop: She notices things. And just as Robles notes the empty Bacardi bottles and crushed Capri Sun juice packs littering the beach, so too does Blauner keep a tight focus on his regional setting. Outsiders may think Long Island is "all white beaches and clay tennis courts, summer in the Hamptons," but they never see "the ghettos of Wyandanch" or the "shooting galleries in Smithtown." Or the bodies on the beaches. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Kirkus Review
A string of murders on Long Island leads a New York cop into a web of corrupt police officers and politicians in this first-rate suspense novel.When NYPD Detective Lourdes Robles visits the family of a murdered woman, she's outraged that the Long Island Police did nothing when the victim was reported missing nor saw the connections to five similar murders in the course of 15 years. The negligence touches a nerve because Robles' younger sister has been missing for months, but it also eventually points to a powerful police chief who has good reason to want the killings overlooked. Blauner (Proving Ground, 2017, etc.) borrows a few characters from his previous outing, notably Robles, who is the heart and soul at the book's center, as well as her aged Yoda, Kevin Sullivan.The murderer is revealed early on, and the story shifts among several time frames to show how 17-year-old Joseph Tolliver, the son of a policeman, rises to become top cop on Long Island in 2017 and, along the way, a serial killer. It begins when Tolliver lies as the star witness in a 1977 murder trial to help a crooked detective. That marks the start of his storing up favors and influence, manipulating weakness and frailty and the code of silence behind the badge. Other years in focus are 1982, when he commits his first murder as a policeman, and 2012, when he tries something different with a victim. The central conflict doesn't favor Robles, a savvy but impetuous, flawed woman bridling at the Alpha-male cop world, compared with the coolly malign Tolliver, hampering, threatening, and mulling when to quash this hunter, as he has others. Blauner excels with strong, realistic characters, believable police work, and smart, propulsive dialogue.A highly readable and unnervingly close-to-home view of power in the service of evil. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In Blauner's second book in the series (after Proving Ground), young and ambitious Latina NYPD Det. Lourdes Robles heads to Long Island to investigate the death of a young, pregnant woman whose body has washed up on a New York City beach, leading to the discovery of a series of unsolved murders of women along the Sunrise Highway. Instead of cooperation on Long Island, Robles is stonewalled by police, the district attorney, and even the courts. Chapters jump from decade to decade between 1977 and 2017, focusing on the killer's escalation and concentration of power, the investigators who concentrate on finding the killer, and details of the crimes. The murderer is well-developed and a pleasure to root against, evoking genuine anger and frustration from readers, who will find the book difficult to put down. Robles and her personal issues are sincerely conveyed but underexplored, particularly her relationship with her boyfriend. VERDICT This fast-paced, well-told police procedural and thriller with a serial killer, conspiracies, and police corruption will appeal to fans of Reed Farrel Coleman and John Verdon. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/18.]-George Lichman, Rocky River, OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
