Shoot 'em Up

August 15, 2016
After a chaotic start to Mack’s wild third Maisie McGrane mystery (after 2015’s Choked Up), the Chicago cop goes undercover to infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. A highlight of the operation is a comic encounter at a border crossing between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Tex., with a diarrheic bull. Meanwhile, Maisie’s lover, Hank Bannon, has disappeared with no word, and her new partner, bad boy Lee Sharpe, pursues her relentlessly. Lee’s behavior frequently crosses the line from sexy banter to harassment; he even gropes her in front of a DEA agent. Newcomers might be confused by Maisie’s byzantine backstory and the large cast of characters, including her rowdy family, but fans should enjoy wisecracking Maisie’s further adventures. The novel closes on a tantalizing note of moral ambiguity when Maisie admits that she genuinely likes most of the criminals she knows. Readers should be prepared for plenty of political snark (“I stuck out more than a constitutionalist at a DNC rally”). Agent: Laura Bradford, Laura Bradford Literary Agency.

July 15, 2016
A scrappy Chicago cop seeks her own personal justice when her brother is shot.Coming from a family of five older brothers is tough enough, but Maisie McGrane's family is all Irish cops and lawyers in the tough streets of Chicago. Not only do they give her a hard time, but they're also determined to keep her safe, which could be worse. One example? Maisie's Da got her kicked out of the police academy, which should have crushed her dreams of being a cop like him. Not a girl to let something like that keep her down, Maisie talked her way into working deep undercover (she can't even tell her family) as the beard of mob boss Stannislav Renko (Choked Up, 2015). Now that Renko's been smuggled to Serbia by Maisie's actual boyfriend, Hank Bannon, Maisie's on to her next assignment, as soon as she recovers from the injuries of her first. Though Maisie should be focusing on developing her latest cover, she's distracted by the shooting of her brother, Cash. Vowing to get justice for him, she delves further into the convoluted drug scheme run by Violetta Veteratti. Is Maisie in over her head? She wishes she had Hank's calm voice to talk her through what's happening--readers could probably use an outside voice to clarify the narrative too--but Hank's gone AWOL. Instead, Maisie's got to deal with fast-talking Lee Sharpe, a colleague determined to insert himself into her latest assignment, even though his motivation is more about being near Maisie than anything else. Without more information about the book's context, the heroine's full personality doesn't shine; readers will have to focus more than they should on trying to piece together her back story.

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October 1, 2016

Picking up minutes after the action in Choked Up ends, Mack's third Maisie McGrane adventure has the former meter maid (now deep undercover cop) getting stabbed in the thigh by boyfriend Hank Bannon, who was trying to save her from Serbian crime lord Stannislav Renko. The repercussions of this incident take Maisie deep into a criminal underworld when an assassination attempt on the Chicago mayor has the Drug Enforcement Agency and other federal organizations relying on her connections to infiltrate a cartel running drugs into the city. As always, Maisie's overly involved Irish family of cops and lawyers try to protect her from a Chicago filled with heroes, villains, charlatans, and thieves. VERDICT This lively series outing, with its wacky capers and fast-paced plotting, brings to mind works by Lee Goldberg and Janet Evanovich.

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