LIE DOWN WITH THE DEVIL

The course of mobbed-up love never runs smooth.

The Boston DA’s office has indicted cabdriver/shamus Carlotta Carlyle’s boyfriend, Sam Gianelli, for murder, and she can’t find out anything about the case, not even who Sam allegedly killed. Her old boss, homicide chief Joseph Mooney, joins Sam, the son of Beantown’s leading crime boss, in stonewalling her, and she’s effectively barred from visiting her “little sister” Paolina Fuentes, whose traumatic search for her druglord father (Heart of the World, 2006) landed her in a psychiatric hospital. So Carlotta throws herself into a new case, taking a retainer from young businesswoman Jessica Franklin to tail Kenneth Harrison, the fiancé she’s been tipped off is cheating on her. Big mistake. Driving a borrowed cab, Carlotta loses her quarry. And the only reason she doesn’t have to admit her failure to her client is that the client is dead, the victim of a hit-and-run driver who backed up and had another go at her just to make sure. Her death will soon be linked to the Red Ribbon Murder of her friend Danielle Wilder three months prior and the Nausett nation’s bid to protect their tribal land from none other than the Gianelli crime family.

Middling work for Carlotta, less rewarding as an account of crime and detection than as a startling new chapter in the heroine’s checkered personal life.