The Dead Don't Bleed

Starred review from April 11, 2016
History professor Krugler (1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back) makes his triumphant fiction debut with a whodunit set in 1945 Washington, D.C. Lt. Ellis Voigt, an investigator for the Office of Naval Intelligence’s Sabotage, Espionage, and Counterterrorism section, investigates the murder of a colleague, Logan Skerrill, who was found shot to death in a back alley. Before his death, Skerrill was looking into the background of some new employees of the Soviet Union’s trading company in the U.S., but his work was (atypically for him) subpar. He gave the new hires a clean bill of health despite evidence that they were Russian spies. Might Skerrill may have been a blackmail victim? When Voigt finds that the dead man frequented a news-clipping service suspected of Communist affiliations, he’s sent there, undercover, to try to land a job. After being hired, Voigt looks for the business’s weak link and pursues the truth with no scruples about whom he will hurt along the way. The fairly clued solution will surprise most readers, though it will make perfect sense in retrospect. Agent: William Callahan, Inkwell Management.