FIVE THINGS I SEE

The prolific Church launches a new series starring a Jacksonville, Florida, homicide detective whose backstory is as mysterious as her caseload.

It begins with a routine call that leads to a violent crime scene. Someone has beaten and strangled shop clerk Jessica Stewart to death and left her husband, Prof. Daniel Stewart, to bleed out. Det. Grace Hartwell sends her crew to canvass the neighbors, none of whom claims to have seen or heard anything, but there’s something off about Eddie Snow, whom Grace interviews herself. When she reports her suspicions to Lt. Landel back at the station, her boss tells her in no uncertain terms to leave Snow alone. As Landel’s warnings become stronger and more menacing, Grace attempts to concentrate instead on the death of city council auditor Howard Scofield, who fell or was pushed from the top floor of a new hotel. But a string of murders eerily echoing Jessica Stewart’s leads Grace back again and again to the figure the papers have dubbed the Blonde Reaper. Brief snatches of italicized dialogue that introduce each chapter point to a dissociative response to some unspecified trauma that’s linked ever more closely to Grace, who powers through resistance from city fathers, fraudulent big-money investors, colleagues, and her superiors to identify a suspect whose profile fits her working assumptions about the Blonde Reaper to a T. Exulting in her victory over Det. Lance Elliott, the entitled colleague assigned to her team from Special Projects, she rushes to make an arrest and assumes the case is closed. It isn’t. What follows is more tightly ratcheted than anything that’s come before.

A textbook case of how to make a police procedural pulse with energy.