IF A FACE COULD KILL

Murder isn’t the only thing tearing Brigid Quinn’s neighborhood apart—just the most newsworthy.

If there’s one thing almost everyone in Brigid’s Tucson suburb agrees on, it’s that the group home for convicted felons seeking to re-enter the world outside prison should be somewhere, anywhere, else. After a burglar breaks into the bedroom of Nicki Gleason, one of the home’s residents, and is shot to death by the police, Dorita Gordino, the activist realtor whom Brigid thinks of as Dorito, starts a petition to shut the place down. Although Brigid lets herself get browbeaten into signing, her feelings are a lot more mixed than Dorita’s, since she killed a number of predators herself before she retired from the FBI and became a private eye, and she’s largely responsible for placing Nicki, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome who killed her abusive husband, in the group home. Apart from Brigid, Nicki’s only friend is Eleanore Turner, her designated mentor, and there’s something off about Eleanore even apart from that final E. When Dorita is bashed to death and her face set on fire, it’s clear that this is no casual murder. But although another neighbor casually observes of Nicki, “Seems like death follows her,” Brigid can’t help feeling that Dorita’s murder has arisen from much more specific conflicts in the community, which are so deep-seated that almost anyone might have killed her. Her emotions overflow when her psychopathic niece, Gemma-Kate Quinn, is attacked in an episode that’s as marginal to the plot as it is central to Masterman’s edgy tone.

Forget the whodunit and focus on the sharply etched examination of a neighborhood overflowing with animosity.