Night Detectives, The: A David Mapstone Mystery (David Mapstone Mysteries)
*Starred Review* There’s something unsettling about the man who hires the newly formed Phoenix PI firm of former sheriff Mike Peralta and his former deputy, historian David Mapstone. That feeling is confirmed when the client is shot point-blank as he drives away from the meeting. All of which intensifies the former lawmen’s interest in pursuing an investigation into the suspicious death (ruled a suicide) of Grace Hunter, who fell naked and handcuffed from the nineteenth-floor balcony of a San Diego condo. That Peralta and Mapstone are somehow intricately involved in this deadly situation from the start becomes increasingly apparent, as they search for who’s behind it and why, with the help of their previously estranged wives, both of whom return home. Yet as their private lives settle down, both Peralta and Mapstone face heightened danger from a terrifying and all-too-plausible enemy. (As a sidebar to his investigation, Mapstone contrasts soulless Phoenix, where the planners got it wrong, with charming San Diego, where they got it right.) Mapstone’s seventh outing (after South Phoenix Rules, 2010) features tight prose and plotting and a pair of complex and fallible protagonists whose character development continues in a series that just keeps getting better. --Michele Leber