PARTNERS

It’s Project Intercept versus the Break-In Killer in this predictable, irresistible procedural from cold-eyed Cray.

The day after he’s released from his latest stint on Rikers Island, Jorge (Finito) Rakowski discovers quite accidentally that he likes to hurt women. It’s not enough to rob prostitutes or even to strangle them; he wants to keep his victims alive long enough to torture them, and he wants to move up the food chain to women who don’t use drugs or sell their bodies so that the monstrous threat he embodies can humiliate and dehumanize them even further. It isn’t till Finito’s honed his growing skills on his fourth victim that the NYPD has any clue that a serial killer is at work. When Det. Belinda Moore and her white partner, Pudge Pedersson, offer the opinion that the murder bears telltale marks of an earlier killing, they’re brushed off by the Chief of Detectives office. Even after the top cops have finally launched Project Intercept, Belinda and Pudge, still as far ahead of their colleagues as they are behind Finito, keep landing in the doghouse because their unbridled enthusiasm for the case keeps leading them to crippling breaches of protocol.

All of this may sound excruciatingly familiar, but Cray (What You Wish For, 2002, etc.) writes with a gimlet eye for his perp’s ugly fantasies and his cops’ frustrating missteps that makes you forget how often you’ve seen it all before.