GOOD DOG, BAD COP

The K Team goes up against another global terrorist plot whose roots are in Paterson, New Jersey.

Capt. Pete Stanton, the head of Paterson Homicide, was content to dismiss the shootings of PPD Det. Jimmy Dietrich and Susan Avery, whose bodies were found on Dietrich’s boat a year and a half ago, as a murder-suicide. But the shooting of Susan’s husband, Det. Danny Avery, as he sits in a civilian car doing a bit of independent surveillance on Marcella’s restaurant, makes him call in the K Team, those private eyes who specialize in cold cases. Retired detectives Corey Douglas and Laurie Collins supply the brains, their hulking friend Marcus Clark the muscle, and their network of contacts a wealth of specialist expertise. In this case, all those resources will be stretched to the limit, partly because it’s surprisingly hard to connect the three murders (if they were all indeed murders), partly because so many of the colleagues, informants, and lowlifes the K Team talks to end up deceased. It’s very likely that at the time of his death, Avery was spying on New York visitor George Hafner, who’d booked a table for two at Marcella’s that night. Since Hafner was the victim in a drive-by shooting three weeks later in Queens, though, he’s a literal dead end. As Rosenfelt nudges things along by cutting away to computer hacker Ian Solis, whose evil plans are clearly on an epic scale, Corey struggles to make sense of the fact that so many witnesses don’t recognize photographs of so many of the players in the complex case—until he realizes that that failure is itself at the heart of the case.

Untidier and less satisfying than many another conspiracy-to-end-all-conspiracies devised by the ebullient Rosenfelt.