A police detective seeks payback against the Mafia boss who murdered her parents in this debut thriller.

In 1992, 8-year-old Cassandra “Casey” Vice and her siblings were orphaned when gunfire exploded through their house’s windows and their parents were killed by armed thugs. The target was their police captain father, who founded the Criminal Intelligence/Organized Crime Unit, earning the ire of Saturn City’s underworld bosses. Over the next 15 years, Casey (nicknamed the “Spitfire of Vengeance”) is guided by two goals: finding her younger sister, who became irretrievably lost in the foster system, and getting revenge for her parents’ deaths. Casey becomes a detective in the CIOC, achieving rapid promotion thanks to strong skills and the mentorship of her captain, a friend of her father’s. When she gets an unusual request to visit the mansion of Shawn “The Jackknife” Anderson, who heads the Mafia in Saturn City, she’s curious about his agenda and accepts despite the risk, both from him and Internal Affairs. As her captain puts it, “Social visit or not, do you have any idea what IA would do to us if you did go? Especially if you end up dead?” In the meeting, Anderson reveals that he wants Casey to spy for him, threatening her with her parents’ fate if she doesn’t—a tacit admission of guilt. When she refuses, he puts a million-dollar bounty on her head, and Casey is attacked in her own apartment. The attempt is foiled, spurring Casey and the CIOC to conceive a daring plan. They’ll employ a SWAT team, helicopters, and deadly force to attack Anderson’s well-guarded mansion and hopefully put an end to his reign of terror.

In his novel, Rousell uses the satisfying prospect of retribution against tragic injustice as the engine for his plot, which wastes no time in getting to the action-movie finale. But the revenge motif is overly familiar from many novels and films, and the story often founders on shaky plausibility. For example, after being orphaned, Casey and her brother go to two different relatives while their sister is immediately put into foster care “because she was the youngest,” even though kinship care is the first choice with child placement. Matters of procedure, too, often don’t ring true. Casey returns home after the meeting with Anderson to find her door kicked in by strangely incompetent would-be assassins, who not only signal their presence, but also argue audibly while lying in wait. They don’t immediately shoot her because they want the death to look like an accident, so why kick in her door? Supposedly no one knows that the Anderson takedown mission is happening, but how is that possible considering the massive semiautomatic gunfire, shouts over a megaphone, a helicopter, and the ramming of gates with an armored SUV? Similarly, bad guys employ an outlandish, unconvincing diction that’s oddly delicate about profanity: “These damn coppahs done lost their effin’ mahbles!”

A fast-paced but unlikely crime tale.