New River Blues

March 23, 2009
Det. Sarah Burke gets a lesson about Arizona’s struggling construction industry and family greed in Gunn’s taut second police procedural to feature the Tucson cop (after 2008’s Cool in Tucson
).
When someone shoots arts patron Eloise Henderson to death along with her one-night stand, an ex-con-turned-stagehand, the obvious suspect is Eloise’s husband, with whom she’d been having marital problems. As Sarah and her team begin to investigate Eloise’s past, other possible suspects emerge. Meanwhile, caterer Zachariah Cristofou, prompted by society and theater gadfly “Madge,” concocts a scheme to frame a naïve stagehand, Pauly Eckhardt, for the murders, a plot that goes awry when one of the principals starts spilling the beans. Fans of Cool in Tucson
will enjoy catching up with Sarah’s earnest efforts to make a real family for Denny, the daughter of her drug-addicted sister, and her relationship with fellow cop Will Dietz.

March 1, 2009
A middling second case for Tucson homicide detective Sarah Burke.

After a night of drinks, drugs and toy-boy debauchery, wealthy Eloise Henderson and her plaything of the moment have their faces obliterated. Called to the crime scene by appalled neighbors who heard the shots, Chief Delaney hands the double homicide over to Sarah, who settles on the cuckolded husband Roger, a major property developer, as the perp. Unfortunately, his alibi—a trip to Phoenix where he spent the night at an escort service, then got dinged up in a car crash on the way home—holds up. Eloise's daughter Patricia, by turns helpful and hysterical, points them toward the catering help, which included Pauly, now one of the corpses, and his ex-con buddy Nino, now on the run. Also under suspicion are Zack, Madge and Felicity, who dabbled at the Grant Street Theater between catering gigs. Sarah's home life is as chaotic as the crime scene between her mom having heart problems, her druggie sister Janine popping up again, her niece Denny moody and suspicious and her new boyfriend Dietz, also a cop, still recuperating from on-the-job wounds. Eventually, both the Henderson and Burke family situations are straightened out, but probably not for long.

As stolid and serviceable as its predecessor (Cool in Tucson, 2008), but not a patch on Gunn's Jake Hines series.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2009
When Tucson detective Sarah Burke is called to the scene of a grisly double murder in one of the citys most expensive neighborhoods, she has no idea just how bad its going to be. First, theres the stomach-churning crime scene: the victims are found in bed, naked, with their faces shot off, blood and gore splattered everywhere. The female is quickly identified as Eloise Henderson, whose house it is. But the other victim is not her husband, Roger. So who is it, and why was he in Eloises bed? Of course, the first assumption is that the man was Eloises lover, and that Roger, finding them together, killed them both. But Roger has a cast-iron alibi. A likable, energetic heroine; an authentic description of the challenges of modern policing; solid writing; and a plot full of unexpected twists make this second in the Sarah Burke series (following Cool in Tucson, 2008) an intriguing andentertaining police procedural. Gunn is also the author of the critically acclaimed Jake Hines series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)