Cruel Mercy

December 19, 2016
Mark’s absorbing sixth novel featuring Det. Sgt. Aector McAvoy (after 2016’s Dead Pretty) takes McAvoy from Yorkshire to upstate New York, to help Det. Ronald Alto of the NYPD solve an attack that put revered boxing coach Brishen Ayres in a coma and left Shay Heldon, Ayres’s brash young protégé, dead, with a mysterious second young man impaled on a nearby tree branch. McAvoy’s task is to track down his troublemaker brother-in-law, Valentine Teague, another boxer and a bitter rival of Heldon’s, missing since the ambush. As McAvoy and Alto try to uncover how Ayres and Heldon ended up victims of what soon appears to be a scrambled professional hit, their investigation slides into New York City’s world of organized crime: deals made, deaths dealt, power upheld. In the final stretch, the narrative skids between a well-wrought examination of the brutal pragmatism of mob dealings and a macabre vignette of religious fanaticism, bundling an unwieldy thicket of side plots into a satisfyingly melodramatic, if implausible, ending twist. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath (U.K.).

Starred review from December 15, 2016
A British policeman blunders into gang warfare and worse in New York City. DS Aector McAvoy of the Humberside Police knows what's important to him: his wife, Roisin; their children; his boss, Trish Pharaoh; and his job. When Irish boxer Shay Helden is murdered and his coach, Brishen Ayres, badly wounded and left in a coma while on a trip to New York, the Traveler families of both men suspect rival Traveler and fellow boxer Valentine Teague, who is Roisin's brother. Pharaoh pulls strings to get Aector sent to New York to try to prove Valentine innocent before the long-simmering differences between the Traveler families become open warfare. His NYPD liaison, Ronald Alto, has been told only that Aector has knowledge that might help with the case, but Aector opens up to him, which puts Valentine on the suspect list in New York. Since the visitors had been in New York only two days and spent most of their time at the gym in hopes of arranging a boxing match for Shay with a major promoter, the police are having trouble establishing another motive. The pair also visited Saint Colman's church, the former parish of Father Jimmy Whelan, a popular priest now in Ireland who helped Valentine get a last-minute passport to follow Shay and Brishen. Aector's questions attract the interest of the Italian and Russian mafias, who both have an interest in boxing, legal and otherwise. Helping the NYPD catch a sexual predator helps establish Aector with the locals, but much is still being hidden from him. Occasional chapters throughout the book reveal the thoughts of both a stone-cold Mafia hit man and a psychopathic killer whose horrific crimes may be related to both the Mafia and the church. Though he's never imagined chatting face to face with Mafia bosses, that may be the only way he can untangle a series of murders past and present and save Valentine. To call Mark's novels (Taking Pity, 2015, etc.) police procedurals is like calling the Mona Lisa a pretty painting. Beautifully crafted, filled with flashbacks, horror, angst, and chilling detail, this one is his most complex and best yet.

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Starred review from January 1, 2017

Sometimes a crime is so big that even a hulking Scotsman such as DS Aector McAvoy must stretch his detecting chops and leg it to America to solve a case. So it goes in Mark's riveting sixth installment (after Dead Pretty) of his (usually) UK-based crime series. This time around, McAvoy is in New York, on the hunt for wife Roisin's missing brother, Valentine Teague. Complicating matters is that Teague is an Irish traveler, a member of a group often pejoratively referred to as tinkers and gypsies. Add to this mess the corpse and almost-corpse (he's in a medically induced coma) of two other Irishmen--boxing coach Brishen Ayres and his star fighter Shay Helden--who were traveling with Teague in New York, and there's more than enough reason for McAvoy to cross the Atlantic to investigate. Teague and Helden have a history, both in and out of the ring, and now that they're in America, it's getting swept up into a larger story of the Italian mob, illegal fights, and even a hit man from Chechnya. (Mark is never one to shy away from expansive, even epic-sized, plots--but he always pulls it off.) Joining forces with NYPD Det. Ronald Alto, McAvoy has his work cut out for him. VERDICT Even with a change of setting, Mark proves once again that he can handle the darkest of plots, always with a jolt of black humor, putting him on the level of Scottish and English contemporaries such as Denise Mina, Val McDermid, and Peter Robinson. [See Prepub Alert, 8/15/16.]

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016
DS Aector McAvoy, the giant Scottish copper (Taking Pity, 2015), is off to New York to assist the NYPD in solving the shootings of Ireland's top boxing trainer and his protege. Brishen Ayres, the trainer, is comatose, and his protege, Shay Helden, is dead. But McAvoy's personal goal is to find his wild, pugnacious brother-in-law, Valentine Teague, who followed the two victims to New York and may be about to turn a years-old feud between two traveler clans into a shooting war. Reviews of Mark's previous McAvoy novels have noted the author's labyrinthine and borderline operatic plots. But Cruel Mercy, in homage to the Big Apple, goes full-on operatic. It mixes a sketchy alliance of Italian and Chechen mobsters, a Philly hit man, a Catholic priest whose good intentions get tragically twisted by being confessor to Italian gangsters, a mob lawyer and money launderer whose madness and Catholic faith bring him to self-mutilation and serial murder, and a mute serial killer who can speak only to his victims. Glances back at nearly 50 years of odd goings-on in the city that never sleeps pepper this strange but compelling brew.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)