THE FALL

In a break from her moody Caleb/Thinnes series (The Feline Friendship, 2003, etc.), Dymmoch takes a photographer on a tour of an even wilder side of Chicago.

What could be more peaceful than photographing a flock of November geese in Crestwood Park? But when Joanne Lessing turns her lens from the seasonal spectacle to a hit-and-run driver she captures in mid-flight, she’s making big trouble for herself. Not because the accident is any big deal—nobody’s involved but the runaway driver—but because the man whose picture she’s snapped is soon linked to the murder of a neighborhood mob informant a few minutes earlier. When another witness puffed up with her own importance is killed in another hit-and-run, FBI agent Paul Minorini stops begging Joanne to go before a grand jury and instead subpoenas her, even though they both know her testimony will end her life as she knows it. Even if she isn’t killed, she’ll have to enter the Witness Protection Program and give up her relatives, her job, and the life she’s made for herself and her teenaged son since she split with her husband, an LA lawyer. So far, so straightforward—but the spins Dymmoch puts on the wary romance between the Fed and the woman he loves but keeps endangering take this story into deeper and deeper waters.

Dymmoch alternates brilliantly between steadily compelling psychological suspense and surprises that move so fast they’re scary.