Overview

A troubled cop obsessively searches for a young girl's killer. The young girl lies in a ditch without a scratch on her -- a white high school student stretched out dead in the black part of Atlanta. She was a rich girl from a cold family, too genteel for the neighborhood where she died, and only the baby in her belly suggests how she might have gotten there. For Detective Frank Clemons, the scene is far too familiar. Too close to how it was when he found his own daughter, dead in the woods by her own hand, her youthful beauty cruelly ravaged by depression. Her suicide ended his marriage and sent him on a downward spiral that has nearly claimed his own life. To hang on to sanity, he must do everything he can to find justice for the dead.

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9780006176534

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Reviews

Cook (Blood Innocents, The Orchids) moves from psycho-thrillers to the police-procedural genre with a moody, competent, slightly pretentious item set in Atlanta - where cop Frank Clemons is going through heavy times: losing his wife, mourning his dead teen-age daughter (suicide), boozing, getting beaten up, the whole post-Wam-baugh shmear. Understandably, then, Clemons is happy to concentrate on work. And the case at hand is the murder of rich, pregnant orphan Angelica Deveraux, 18, found dead in a grungy part of town - thanks to an injection of lye-based poison. Clemons, teaming up with older black cop Caleb Stone, learns - primarily from Angelica's older sister Karen - that the dead girl, though super - beautiful, was an utter loner: chilly, detached. The father of her unborn child, it turns out, was a prep - school acquaintance - a one-night stand whom Angelica (a virgin) passionlessly seduced. Her evenings, Clemons eventually discovers, were often spent in slinking around Atlanta's kinkier art galleries in a variety of costumes - and attracting attention, especially from a couple of far-out artists (one gay, one not). The sleuthing here, though modestly absorbing as it chugs along, is uninspired - with a ho-hum windup (largely from out of left field). The hero's tragic trappings - including two sudden deaths and a star-crossed romance with Karen Deveraux - are laid on thick with solemn, purplish prose. Still: readable, steadily paced legwork for those who like their cops bruised, dour, and lonely. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Twice nominated for an Edgar Award, Thomas H. Cook is the author of thirteen acclaimed novels. Born in Alabama, he lives in New York City.

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