ALONE AT NIGHT

A case that’s ice cold when Detective Marshall Bahr takes it on suddenly turns murderously hot.

Mars “the Candy Man” Bahr has been reassigned. He and Nettie Frisch, his beautiful young partner, have moved over from Minneapolis PD to Minnesota’s Cold Case Unit, and Mars is fretting. He misses the rush of a big city homicide department. Though he doesn’t miss the politics, even backstabbing takes on a nostalgic hue as the unproductive days pile up. In near desperation, he drives four hours to the town of Redstone to talk to retired Chief of Police Sigvald Sampson about the night Andrea Bergstad, 17, disappeared. It’s a case Sig Sampson has never forgiven himself for not cracking. Clues were scant, Mars points out: a pair of elusive witnesses, an abruptly terminated phone call. There wasn’t much to go on then, and there’s even less now, almost two decades later. Then, unexpectedly, there’s a break in the case when a TV broadcast forces a Vietnam veteran to remember something he doesn’t want to. Now there are connections to be made, and Mars and Nettie set about making them in ways that scare the daylights out of both. Powerful men are involved, men with secrets who’ll stop at nothing to keep them buried.

An excellent police procedural and more. In his fourth outing (The Last Witness, 2003, etc.), Mars becomes the central figure in a tense, suspenseful, even poignant human drama.