STORM RISING

A cop’s widow tries to clear her late husband’s name.

Politics may make strange bedfellows, but murder makes even stranger ones. The first day he first partnered with veteran Ernie Tait, Detective Jack Hendricks learned that the subject of Jack’s predecessor, Cal Parrish, was off limits. Seems Cal was killed eight years into their partnership under circumstances that never made sense to Jack. Poking quietly into the murder gives Jack more than a hint that Cal had developed ties to New Jersey’s Lanza crime family. Since he can’t share his suspicions with Ernie, he turns to Hudson County prosecutor Robert Olivetti. But Jack’s investigation is short-circuited when he’s shot to death in a parking garage. His wife, Lucy, moves to Florida, where her parents own a bar, and gives birth to Jack’s son, Kevin. When Kevin is 5, he abruptly develops a medically inexplicable limp and at the same time demands to go “home” to Bayonne, a city where he never lived. At the end of her rope, Lucy moves back to New Jersey, where she gets her face rubbed in rumors that her husband was killed because he was dirty. As she tries to get at the truth of Jack’s murder, Kevin’s behavior becomes increasingly alarming. He speaks in an adult voice, telling her information only Jack could have known. Lucy contacts Olivetti to help with her investigation. She in turn is contacted by Dominic Lanza, who wants to help her prove his crime family innocent of Jack’s murder. With allies that include a mob boss, a prosecutor, and a 5-year-old who’s in touch with the dead, how can Lucy fail to crack her case?

Schofield continues the unlikely merger of hard-boiled and fantasy he launched in Time of Departure (2015, etc.). There’s probably more here for detective fans than paranormal buffs but still enough for both camps.