WHITE TIGER

Det. John Thinnes is pulled off the murder of a Vietnamese widow in record time after he recognizes her only when she’s undressed.

The Chicago police force removes you from a case if there’s an obvious conflict of interest, and John Thinnes (The Feline Friendship, 2003, etc.) has a whopper. Not only was he best man for the 1972 marriage of his buddy Bobby Lee and his Vietnamese bride, but according to an anonymous tip, he may be the father of Hue Ann Lee’s son Tien. Thinnes, who celebrated the nuptials by getting drunk on absinthe, isn’t sure whether the charge is true, though he knows that Bobby certainly wasn’t Tien’s father. The old wounds open up again with the rumor that the White Tiger, a notorious Saigon gang leader, is active again in the Windy City—maybe avenging the long-ago murder of an elusive prostitute named Jasmine, maybe inspired by a more cold-hearted motive. Shuttling as usual between Thinnes and his friend Jack Caleb, a gay psychiatrist whose post-traumatic stress therapy group seems to be channeling the killer, Dymmoch (The Fall, 2004, etc.) seasons the quest for the White Tiger with poisoned cameos of long-haunted Vietnam veterans and their indelibly horrifying flashbacks.

The muddled, elliptical mystery is the least interesting aspect of a case that demonstrates how the parts—especially Thinnes’s quest for expiation and the truth about himself—can be greater than the whole.