THE EDGE OF JUSTICE

More valleys than peaks in a debut thriller featuring a mountain-climbing cop.

Special Agent Antonio (Anton) Burns of Wyoming’s Division of Crime Investigation is a self-acknowledged addict. He needs, is hooked on, the adrenaline rush that comes “with all that air beneath your heels.” So he’s the logical choice for an assignment that takes him to the town of Laramie, to check out the death of a young female climber. And a suspicious death it is. For starters, there’s the injury to the back of Kate Dunning’s head, an injury she couldn’t have sustained during her fall. Besides that, there’s the eagerness of the sheriff and a variety of other law-enforcement bigwigs to label accidental a death so obviously not. Anton smells a cover-up, and he’s right, of course: it’s one that powerful people are fully invested in, bringing Anton a quick harvest of malevolent enemies. It hardly helps that he’s fighting a war on two fronts: In the aftermath of an earlier investigation, he’s also facing an official hearing into his own behavior. While fending off three hoodlums, he shot and killed them, and, though the claim is thoroughly worthless, certain unkind members of the press have taken to calling him “Quick Draw” and referring to him as a “rogue cop.” For reasons Anton ascribes to “politics”—McKinzie leaves the details annoyingly unspecified—he isn’t receiving much by way of support from the state’s attorney general (his boss), and severe disillusion is setting in. Nevertheless, a job’s a job, and despite multiple warnings and several beatings, Anton settles in to solve what needs solving and foil what needs foiling before departing from Laramie bloody but unbowed.

Deep-dyed villains borrowed from 19th-century melodrama undercut what might have been a promising first effort.