BLACK AND BLUE

Investigator Jon Frederick pursues a cold case involving a grieving cop in Weber’s sixth crime novel in a series.

It’s 2013, and 25-year-oldBlack Minneapolis police officer Zave Williams is off-duty. While trying to buy eggs, he meets a crying 19-year-old, White grocery store employee named Sadie Sullivan. It turns out that she’s engaged, but she’s having doubts about marrying her boyfriend, who’s also a cop, although Zave doesn’t know him. Zave and Sadie quickly become friends; there’s clear romantic chemistry between them, although when it becomes evident that Sadie can’t be talked out of marrying her fiance, Zave gives her space. Not long afterward, Sadie is found dead in the woods outside the city, and a Black boxer with gang affiliations and two previous sexual assault charges is arrested for her rape and murder. Zave is present for the arrest, but it doesn’t dull the pain he feels over Sadie’s killing. As years pass, however, the boxer appeals the conviction, and serous questions are raised about his guilt. One suspicious observer is Jon Frederick, a White agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who suspects, due to details of the crime scene, that a cop killed Sadie. Before long, he reopens the long-closed case and looks at Zave as a potential suspect. Weber’s energetic prose captures the fixations of his characters and effectively charts their development over the course of almost a decade, as when Sadie pops into Zave’s mind eight years after her death: “I’d had this nagging shame over Sadie’s death eating at me, lately. Was there something I could’ve said to her that would have changed her outcome?” Some of the attempts to tie in topical issues of police brutality and civil unrest feel a little forced, as do quotations from famous Black writers that begin each chapter. The identity of the ultimate culprit isn’t too great of a mystery, but Weber largely succeeds at demonstrating how issues of race and policing are intricately entangled.

An ambitious and often engaging, if imperfect, mystery.