VCI head Eddie Mahler starts his day with possibly the worst online date ever and returns to the office to find the officer he lent out to Narcotics has been stabbed with a rapier.
And the FBI is blackmailing another of his officers to rework a case she left behind when she quit them and came to work for him. They’ve got cases of their own hanging fire, they’re still helping Narcotics take down a local drug lord, and then a wife shows up to report her husband missing. Like they need the extra work, not to mention the aggravation. But this is what they do and they wade in without hesitation, bringing their A game with them, and by the end Eddie’s question to himself, “Are we a good team?” is answered resoundingly in the affirmative.
Wiesel manages to make the minutiae of police work mesmerizing; the interview scenes are particularly good, as they were in his first novel in this series (The Silenced Women), and the violation of privacy suffered by every victim of a violent crime feels agonizingly real. The characters are developing well, too. Eddie is figuring himself out, Frames displays unexpected depths (to me, anyway), and the scene where we get to see what Eden would like to say to the attorney who has just shredded her most important case and what she does say is just about perfect.