APHRODITE

A smart cop, a mad scientist, and a fountain-of-youth project that springs a leak.

It’s all so low-key at the start. All right, not really, given that there’s a mysterious death, and that the venue is a tiny Long Island town where law enforcement is seldom called upon to do more than hand out traffic tickets. It takes Justin Westwood to make the dread connections. Once a big-city homicide detective on the fast track, he was derailed by a horrific family tragedy and subsequently took himself out of his job and the rest of society. But instincts are instincts, and Justin, once the model of a supercop, can’t help but see what his overwhelmed colleagues on the East End Harbor PD are blind to: that the death of local reporter Susanna Morgan was anything but accidental, and that a dark and dangerous conspiracy is inextricably attached. Multibillionaire/world-class scientist/certifiable crackpot Douglas Kranston has long been seeking some means of halting the aging process. Now suddenly Justin, along with a child and her mother, looms as an obstacle. Kranston’s beloved project requires that for all three the aging process must be curtailed with extreme prejudice.

Once again, Andrews (Icarus, 2001, etc.) demonstrates his knack for making a sympathetic hero likable enough to redeem—well, almost redeem—an impossibly convoluted plot.