DARK HUMOR

Two years after his wife’s death, private investigator Nils Shapiro is finally poised to find and punish her killer.

Most people know Sammy Sykes as a celebrity pitchman, but Nils knows him as the drug lord who ordered the hit on Gabriella Nuñez, the Minneapolis police chief who was his wife and colleague. Now that he’s gotten a huge payout, retired from the force, and returned to Stone Arch Investigations with his old friend Anders Ellegaard, Nils is intent on making Sammy pay the price. During his supervised visit with Sammy’s daughter, dirty ex-cop Anna Sykes, Nils notices a subtle tell that prison guard William Schmiechen is on Sammy’s payroll, and that’s all it takes to start him on a trail of criminal contacts that winds from Minneapolis to Amsterdam to Munich before ending in Salzburg. Along the way, he mentions to wealth manager Casey Van der Ven, who’s sitting next to him on a transatlantic flight, that he’s a private eye, and when she asks him to find her missing husband, cheese importer Ivan Dijkstra, the tale moves decisively into Jack Reacher territory, as Nils pursues one case that’s come to him out of nowhere and another that couldn’t be more personal. Confronting Sammy under less than ideal circumstances, he’s ready to let him off the hook until his quarry threatens his 6-year-old daughter, Evelyn. From that point on, there’s no going back. Goldman piles on the complications and unwinds the mysteries in a taut, grimly humorous first-person narrative that explains his title better than any single incident in the story.

Perfect reading for an airplane, foreign hotel, or anywhere else you have a few hours to enliven.