With a midnight bank robbery in progress, Chicago police lieutenant Holton strides forcefully into his eighth Chicago police thriller featuring Chief of Detectives Commander Larry Cole and his sidekick, Lt. Blackie Silvestri (The Left Hand of God, 1999, etc.). The robbery has been planned by the world’s greatest bank robber, Julianna Saint, known also as The Devil’s Shadow. Her object: to retrieve from a safe-deposit box a pistol and videotape proving that mob boss Big Jake Romano murdered his boss, Mafia don Vic Mattioli. Cole has faced some savage female serial killers, especially the Superwoman fiend of Windy City (1995), but no female criminal matches the smarts of Julianna Saint, who lives to crack safes another day. Flat sentences strike like notched dum-dums but tear holes in the reader’s sleep.
