THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE

Sinful seeds bear murderous fruit.

Chicago private eye Joe Kozmarski doesn’t much like the Samuelson case, a run-of-the-mill no-brainer if ever there was one. You load your camera, bag the requisite salacious shots of the adulterous Mrs. Samuelson, hand them over to the cuckolded client. Soon enough, however, it becomes obvious to Joe—astute sleuth that he proved himself to be in his debut (The Last Striptease, 2007)—that this is a case with legs, thanks in part to the high-profile corpse lying in Greg Samuelson’s office. Sister Judy Terrano was nicknamed the Virginity Nun, a condition forensic evidence renders dubious. Her clothes are in disarray, her belly inscribed with the faded tattoo of a cat in what appears to be a state of arousal. Beneath this, in magic marker, someone has scrawled, “Bad kitty.” The client himself is also in his office, comatose, bleeding copiously from a bullet wound the cops say is self-inflicted. Murder-suicide, they insist, but Joe begs to differ. Skepticism deepens when he launches an investigation that reveals ancient and murky connections between Sister Judy and a pair of powerful Chicago families, the kind for whom old injuries are never really old, and vengeance never less than sweet.

Sound and fury and mindless violence, signifying that a pretty good writer has yet to find a story commensurate with his talent.