By Any Means (Ash Rashid)
This begins as a police procedural and a mighty good one. Detective Sergeant Ash Rashid of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, driving home from work, comes across a crime scene: two people executed in a crashed Mercedes. For 20-plus pages, we watch Ash deploy the prose of police work—rerouting traffic, searching the ground, ordering neighbors questioned, and so on—and Culver’s skill makes all this obsessively readable. As the narrative goes on, the author works, with great success, to bring freshness to the genre’s conventions: the hero’s greenhorn partner, the meddlesome feds, the surly superior, the worried wife. Then Ash pulls a questionable stunt—like so many PIs before him—that puts the bad guys away. What’s more important? he asks after he’s caught. Following proper procedures or saving someone’s life? Gumshoes can talk that way but not ­government employees, or so we’re taught to think. Like other richly portrayed contextual details—Ash’s Muslim faith set against his booze problem—these digressions slow the narrative a bit, but the reader won’t care. This is a first-class cop novel. --Don Crinklaw