Storm Rising

August 22, 2016
A dash of the paranormal spices this exciting crime novel from Schofield (Time of Departure). Five years after the murder of Kevin Hendricks’s police detective father, the four-year-old boy demands to go home to Bayonne, N.J., a place he has never been. Kevin’s mother, Lucy, grows increasingly uneasy as he recalls memories he couldn’t possibly have. Lucy fled to Florida from New Jersey when the investigation into Jack’s death concluded that he was crooked. At last ready to face her past, Lucy returns to Bayonne, where she looks into Jack’s death, uncovering a car theft ring and another police officer’s murder that Jack was investigating on his own time. Turning her evidence over to deputy prosecutor Robert Olivetti leads to Lucy learning of her own family’s ties to a Mafia don, Dominic Lanza, and when forced into a partnership with Lanza, Lucy must untangle the lies of the past to save her son and herself. Readers will gladly suspend disbelief as Schofield takes them on a whirlwind ride. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management.

September 15, 2016
A cop's widow tries to clear her late husband's name.Politics may make strange bedfellows, but murder makes even stranger ones. The first day he first partnered with veteran Ernie Tait, Detective Jack Hendricks learned that the subject of Jack's predecessor, Cal Parrish, was off limits. Seems Cal was killed eight years into their partnership under circumstances that never made sense to Jack. Poking quietly into the murder gives Jack more than a hint that Cal had developed ties to New Jersey's Lanza crime family. Since he can't share his suspicions with Ernie, he turns to Hudson County prosecutor Robert Olivetti. But Jack's investigation is short-circuited when he's shot to death in a parking garage. His wife, Lucy, moves to Florida, where her parents own a bar, and gives birth to Jack's son, Kevin. When Kevin is 5, he abruptly develops a medically inexplicable limp and at the same time demands to go "home" to Bayonne, a city where he never lived. At the end of her rope, Lucy moves back to New Jersey, where she gets her face rubbed in rumors that her husband was killed because he was dirty. As she tries to get at the truth of Jack's murder, Kevin's behavior becomes increasingly alarming. He speaks in an adult voice, telling her information only Jack could have known. Lucy contacts Olivetti to help with her investigation. She in turn is contacted by Dominic Lanza, who wants to help her prove his crime family innocent of Jack's murder. With allies that include a mob boss, a prosecutor, and a 5-year-old who's in touch with the dead, how can Lucy fail to crack her case? Schofield continues the unlikely merger of hard-boiled and fantasy he launched in Time of Departure (2015, etc.). There's probably more here for detective fans than paranormal buffs but still enough for both camps.

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September 15, 2016
Lucy Hendricks knows that returning to New Jersey with her son, Kevin, won't be easy. The media made the murder of her husband, Jack, out to be a Mafia hit on a dirty cop, but Lucy is determined to teach her son who whom? his father really was. Five-year-old Kevin, however, already seems to know everything there is to know about the father he never met, sometimes even speaking as if he is his father. Lucy takes help from psychologists, cops, prosecutors, even a local Mafia don, but at least one of her helpers has an ulterior motive. Will memories of Jack's memories help Kevin keep Lucy safe? An intriguing domestic thriller with supernatural elements.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016

Schofield, who debuted with the well-received Time of Departure, returns with another thriller that might or might not be edged with the mystical. Lucy Hendricks fled Bayonne, NJ, with son Kevin after the murder of her husband, a straight-arrow cop belatedly suspected of involvement with the local Mafia. When she returns five years later, Kevin starts acting oddly, offering details about the murder he couldn't know. And that storm said, in the title, to be rising? It's Hurricane Sandy.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2016

Hurricane Sandy is bearing down on Bayonne, NJ, where Lucy Hendricks and her son, Kevin, have returned after living in Florida. Lucy's policeman husband, Jack, was murdered five years ago, before Kevin was born, and Lucy left New Jersey amid swirling rumors about Jack's connections to the Mafia. But the reality stretches back generations to Sicily and Lucy's family ties. Kevin also is connected to Jack, manifesting his father's memories on occasion, which scares Lucy a lot. VERDICT Schofield follows up his acclaimed debut, Time of Departure, a slightly crazed time-travel odyssey, with a spooky thriller in which strange memories affect the protagonists' present-day lives. For anyone who enjoys mysteries with a twist, but beware, this is no ghostly cozy. Think Kay Hooper's "Bishop/Special Crimes Unit" series. [See Prepub Alert, 5/16/16.]

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.