LUCKY BONES

A wacko theft launches a second case for a private eye who just can’t shut up.

The shot that retired Sam Kelson from the Chicago PD in Trouble in Mind (2020) left him unable to lie or filter his thoughts, or sometimes even recognize himself in the mirror. Despite these disabilities, attractive business owner Genevieve Bower thinks he’s the one to recover all the knockoff Jimmy Choos that 1980s-music DJ Jeremy Oliver ended their nine-day fling by walking off with. (The client might have thought twice if she’d seen what Kelson did the moment their initial meeting ended.) Meanwhile, one-armed bookkeeper Marty LeCoeur, Kelson’s old friend,  is being pressed by the brain trust at G&G Private Equity—wealthy Harold Crane, his cold-eyed daughter, Sylvia, and Chip Voudreaux—to do some creative accounting that will leave them even wealthier. Marty won’t do it, but his nephew Neto, a young hacker who already has a record, is willing. Bad mistake. Moments before Neto completes the transaction, a bomb smuggled into the library where he’s working kills homeless Afghan War vet Victor Almonte and Amy Runeski, an unemployed mother suing for divorce, and sends Neto to the hospital with a dire diagnosis. Against every rule but that of formula fiction, the two cases turn out to be connected through a hush-hush thumb drive that was the real prize stolen from Kelson’s client. Can he avoid telling the many supporting crooks who press him for information exactly how much he knows for long enough for them to wipe each other out?

Wiley spins a florid plot as disinhibited, and ultimately as exhausting to deal with, as his hero.