RED TIDE

There are new dents and rents in Frank Corso’s knightly clothing, but he battles the bad guys as hard as ever.

Seattle’s most chivalric true-crime writer is more cynical these days, his worldview darker, but he’s still genetically programmed to slay dragons. This one at first appears innocent enough in the figures of some energetic local cops. When squad cars block off strategic segments of the waterfront, Corso’s antennae dance up a prophetic storm. Seattle is about to go sleepless because of an Ebola-like killer let loose in the city. By whom? International terrorists, of course, says the FBI, but Corso isn’t so sure. On his ex-girlfriend’s kitchen floor there’s a gruesomely mutilated dead man who might well tell a different tale if Corso and the Seattle PD can figure out how he came to be there. Enter Rodney Holmes, former East Indian police officer, former respectable and loving head of a family that no longer exists, a man whose grief gives him a massive grudge, and his gang of well-schooled Irregulars, East Indian street kids arrived with grudgelets of their own. So the Feebies aren’t necessarily wrong. It’s just that terror increases exponentially when politics becomes personal.

If this case is a shade less riveting than Frank’s first three (A Blind Eye, 2003, etc.), it’s only because Ford allows his tough, impossibly idealistic hero to spend less time than he should facing those windmills head-on.