THE GRAVES

The sophomore case for Abigail Endicott, Boston’s chief homicide prosecutor, looks like just one piece of bad news after another.

Abby’s brief walk to the Liberty Hotel, where her boyfriend, black sax player Tyson Clarke, is part of the entertainment for a posh reception, is interrupted when she’s mugged by a drug dealer and sometime informant she knows from court, where he's a witness in a murder trial. “You have to stop mugging people,” she tells him kindly as she picks herself up, “at least until our case has gone through the appeals process.” She’s pulled away from the reception by Detective Kevin Farnsworth’s news that Boston’s finest have found a woman’s corpse—stripped, raped, and posed—that eerily recalls the murder a month earlier of Boston U. sophomore Rose Driscoll. Sidelined by the violence that closed her first case (Mission Hill, 2016), Abby’s so determined to get onto this one that she’s willing to cross swords repeatedly with her boss, politically ambitious district attorney Max Lombardo, who’s spooked when the trail promptly leads Abby straight to an influential senator’s son. The discovery of a third victim confirms everyone’s suspicions that they’re up against a serial killer. If that revelation isn’t exactly a surprise, Wechsler has plenty of other surprises up her sleeve concerning Abby’s stuffy and disapproving family, an unexpected political opportunity offered to her, the common denominator that links the victims, and the investigation and trial. And she juggles them all with an assurance that makes her future look a lot more secure than her heroine’s.

Catnip for readers attached to Boston, believably strong women, legal intrigue, or any combination of the above.