JOHNNY-BOY

Who’s more evil, the hired killer who’s blown into a Missouri town or the cops who’ve vowed to protect its citizens?

As the Baxter Police Department’s chief of detectives, Delia Mariola has seen many victims of violence. But few of them rival Case Dixon, a high school kid who wandered away from a local hangout utterly incapable of fending for himself and wasn’t seen till three days later, when he was found strangled to death after prolonged torture. Everybody in town—from Case’s father, a lumberyard owner on the board of Baxter’s Chamber of Commerce, to police commissioner Vern Taney—thinks it would be just great if Case’s nasty schoolmate Bard Henry, who’s threatened him repeatedly and was seen just outside the spot he disappeared from, did time for his murder. But even after they arrest the youth, neither Delia nor Blanche Weber, the detective in charge of the case, thinks Bard could have planned or executed a crime that required this much foresight. And they’re right. The real murderer was Johnny-Boy Witten, an assassin currently calling himself Paul Ochoa, who loves his work so much that he passes the time in torture killings while he’s waiting for a chance to tag Theo Diopolis, the autoworker he’s been hired to kill. Professional as he is, Johnny-Boy narrowly misses his chance to put down Diopolis. Now the pressure is on him to make good on his contract even as Delia and Blanche dig up evidence of a much wider ring of civil servants and cops in their own department. The results are as suspenseful as they are ultimately predictable.

Carter ends with a bonus: There’s plenty of corruption left for her detectives to fight in the next round.