DOOLEY’S BACK

Frank Dooley was a Chicago cop, a good one on the fast track, until he committed murder. Not that many of his colleagues blamed him for it. Dooley’s adored wife Consuelo had been raped, brutalized, and slaughtered, and the confessed killer had walked on one of those technicalities that make justice a mockery and vigilantism hard to resist. Dooley had stalked, trapped, and shot the perp, simultaneously ending a vicious life and a brilliant career. Though there was no evidence against him and no serious search for any, Dooley resigned from the force he loved and exiled himself to Mexico for eight meaningless years. But now, driven by homesickness, he’s back, and almost immediately on the hunt again for the murderer of Roy Ferguson, once Dooley’s partner and closest friend. Tricked by a clever, mob-connected hoodlum, he’s been gunned down, a homicide apparently as far beyond the reach of conventional law enforcement as Consuelo’s. Once again, Dooley feels compelled to take matters into his own hands. Bound by promises to himself and others not to pull the trigger personally, he carefully puts together a sting he hopes will hoist Ray’s murderer by his own petard. But it’s a dangerous game he’s playing, and if he loses, Dooley knows that this time there’s no coming back.

Canny noirist Reaves (Get What’s Coming, 1995, etc.) keeps the action lean and mean until that far-fetched, impossibly elaborate sting turns it soft and fuzzy at the end.