DARK BLUE DEATH

A sophomore Texas procedural soaked in blood and earnestness.

Minutes after she’s been yawning through a training exercise at the Austin Police Academy, Cadet Ramona Sanchez is shot dead by a sniper in one of the most surprising murders of the year. There are precious few clues, but fortunately for Officer Zoe Barrow, the Austin cop who’s been seconded to the Academy just in time to help train Sanchez and hunt her killer, the perp can’t leave well enough alone. The list of Mexican-American law enforcement officers or ex-officers with butterfly tattoos on their butts soon stretches to three, maybe four—it’s hard to tell which shootings may be the work of a copycat. Even without the case, Zoe would have a lot on her mind. Her husband Byron, a SWAT officer reduced to a vegetative state by a shooter Zoe later killed (Austin City Blue, 2001), has gone missing from his nursing home, even though he can’t move or talk and has zero ransom value. No matter. Zoe bears down with superhuman concentration, and together with her king-sized partner Harry Albright and a pair of eager-beaver FBI agents, she eventually puts together a case.

Grape keeps things moving briskly—so briskly she rushes over Byron’s disappearance, the killer’s psychology and Zoe’s detective work, though she does find time for a series of interchapters honoring Austin police officers killed in the line of duty back to 1913.