A MURDER OF JUSTICE

A closed case is reopened when a new murder indicates justice was not merely rushed but blind.

Detectives Kearney and Phelps, the backbone of DC Homicide for the past 25 years, catch a true puzzler. Why did the bullet that tore through drug kingpin Skeeter Hodges and wounded his pal Pencil have Pencil’s fingerprints on it? And why did it come from the same gun that killed Senate chairman Rhinelander’s chief of staff Kevin Gentry two years before and then vanished? If Gentry was in the drug trade with Skeeter, then who offed Pencil in a later incident? The case is tossed around like a football. Kearney and Phelps’s boss Randolph Emerson wants to appoint a task force; the CIA wants in; the FBI wants a piece of the action; and the media wants someone, anyone, who can make Watergate-like headlines. Gentry, it seems, was not a bad guy but a former CIA agent running snitches who ratted on several Colombian drug cartels, and the threat of international miscreants means a free-for-all for jurisdiction. There’ll be more murder past and future and a car bomb meant for Kearney before two Beltway players are eased into retirement, another into handcuffs, a third into utter disgrace, and a poor old soul into a dying confession.

A cross between a made-for-TV movie and a grade-B thriller from Andrews (A Murder of Promise, 2002, etc.), who knows his way around Washington, even around Congressional roadblocks.