A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES

An LAPD detective leaves after her first day in her new position to look into a much more personal case.

Maria Cole spent nine years as a street cop before her long-sought promotion put her on the scene just in time to kill a teenage murder suspect in self-defense. At exactly the same moment that she shoots Felix Sotto, her estranged father, Billy Cole, is apparently killed in a robbery in Fair Port, Alabama. Shocked by this uncanny coincidence, Maria flies east even though she’s avoided her father for the past 27 years. She instantly ticks off Police Chief Karl Rawlins by asking sharp questions and goes right on challenging him even after the police arrest Billy’s fellow Alcoholics Anonymous member Dray Forrest for the murder and he all but confesses by hanging himself in his cell. Maria’s discovery that The Gallery, the restaurant Billy managed, was destroyed last month in a fire along with virtually all the paintings he’d been working on for years, makes her resolve to track down the villains, who definitely number more than one. Early on, in fact, she becomes convinced that Billy’s death is part of a vastly broader and deeper pattern of crime and corruption. To her surprise, Maria realizes that “twenty-four hours in his world and she had more empathy” for her alcoholic father than she’d ever experienced before. She also learns that southern Alabama can be just as violent and treacherous as the City of Angels.

A quicksilver family reckoning whose epiphanies arrive in the form of felonies.