THE LAST DARK PLACE

Murder, rape, gang warfare, and his grandson’s bar mitzvah: it’s another busy week for Chicago cop Abe Lieberman (Not Quite Kosher, 2002, etc.).

A short-story prologue—the 1969 invasion of Temple Mir Shavot’s morning minyan by a gunman bent on killing newly minted Det. Lieberman—sets the stage for Lieberman’s trip to Yuma to retrieve the gunman, 30 years older but a lot less wise than the cop he’s cuffed to. When the gunman is killed, the local law is all over the shooter, but it isn’t so easy to figure out who hired him. Nor is it any easier, once Abe is back home, to track down the three punks who assaulted the wife of Det. Sgt. Hugh Morton, a decorated black hero cop, before smart, determined Morton catches up with them himself; or to broker a peace between Emiliano Del Sol and the volatile Twin Dragons of Chinatown; or to prevent mild-mannered sign painter Wayne Czerbiak from gunning down world-famous country-and-western singer Lee Cole Carter in search of his own 15 minutes of fame. Toughest of all, however, may be the problem faced by his partner Bill Hanrahan’s Chinese bride Iris: her cousin, a Falun Gong fanatic, thinks her pregnancy scandalous and won’t quit harassing her no matter who threatens him.

Kaminsky packs Abe’s latest procedural almost too generously with subplots, and then provides most of them a teasing, sometimes heartrending extra kick before calling it a day.