BROKEN WING

New Orleans, a city broken since Hurricane Katrina, is up for grabs.

About to jilt his former supervisor, Special Agent Peggy Weaver, yet again, Mike Yeager has a plausible excuse this time. The FBI is sending him undercover to return to New Orleans, infiltrate the Barca crime family and discover who tortured and killed Simon Burke, a Brit, and proposes to sell his wife Amrita to the highest bidder. Armed with gun, attitude and fake résumé, Mike (The Shadow Catchers, 2006) meets Barca and his half-son Grady and is taken on to handle the Armita deal. Saving one woman becomes complicated by the fact that Barca’s daughter Sofia, the pregnant love Yeager left 20 years ago when he fingered her father for prosecution, also needs rescuing from both her family and her drug addiction. As he crisscrosses the city’s ruined parishes, he realizes that half the people he trusted and most of his new comrades in arms are double-crossing him. Traitors swarm around his former partner Kiplinger’s office, Barca’s inner circle and Kadmos Security, a firm bankrolling billions to rebuild New Orleans. Guns blaze. Bombs explode. Covers are blown. And the more Yeager digs, the worse the corruption gets until he’s forced into a mercy killing and some drastic penitence for his actions.

The very definition of a page-turner, from an author who likes his hero as damaged as his setting.