On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the clich d everything to live for shoots herself dead with a .22. But this case is different. And the colonel is desperate to find a perp, despite massive evidence to the contrary. If so, he has passed with flying colors. True, Mike's search occasionally pushes her up against pulp pathos, but mostly the genre keeps Amis true.
Police are pretty blas about ballistics.
We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn't be there. Mike spends her time weighing the evidence, wishing it would point to murder, and letting us in on some current police realities.