THE KEEPERS

A second outing for dog handler Mason Reid shows him consistently upstaging his canine charges.

Both Mace and his dogs—golden retriever Elvira, German shepherd Sue, farm collie Delta Dawn—specialize in human remains detection. Mace serves as liaison to the Chicago Police Department and several sheriff’s departments; the dogs boast well-trained noses, and Vira something more, an uncanny talent for analyzing scent DNA. The arresting opening tableau, in which they uncover the remains of union negotiator John Averbeck, stabbed to death and dumped in a burning warehouse in the Fulton River District, seems to promise steady work for the cadaver specialists. But first there’s an unrelated homicide—the murder of singer/songwriter Jonny Whiting, the headliner for The U-Turns, bashed to death with his own vintage guitar—whose solution owes less to Mace’s crack team than to Officer Kippy Gimm’s sharp ear for the protests of a suspect who knows too much. Only then can Kippy and Mace join forces to investigate the demise of Peter Feist, of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, whose neck has been broken so badly that he could look behind him if he were still alive. It isn’t long before they realize that mob boss Frank Cappelli Sr., who can’t control his low-functioning namesake son, has full control of behemoth contract killer Cordov Woods and Chicago PD Superintendent Gerald Callum to boot. In fact, the corruption runs still deeper, and Mace and Kippy will be hard-pressed to keep ahead of the bad guys long enough for the dogs to exhibit their welcome but much less unusual secondary talents as lifesaving weapons.

So many corpses on display that you won’t need a cadaver dog to sniff them out.