The Black Cage

December 1, 2019
Who could possibly be more compromised and more jaundiced than rarely employed Chicago shamus Dek Elstrom (Tagged for Murder, 2018, etc.)? Only Milo Rigg, the disgraced investigative reporter who anchors Fredrickson's new series. Fifteen months ago, Rigg pushed a little too hard against Cook County Deputy Jerome Glet for moving the bodies at an earlier crime scene in order to arrange a better photo op for himself. That crime--the murders of young Bobby Stemec and John and Anthony Henderson--still hasn't been solved, and the recently widowed Rigg's attempts to console former exotic dancer Carlotta Henderson, mother of two of the victims, have been widely assumed to extend to an affair that got him banished from the Chicago Examiner to its suburban magazine, the Pink. So neither Rigg nor Glet is pleased when they run into each other at an unpleasantly similar crime scene at Devil's Creek, where teenage sisters Beatrice and Priscilla Graves have been found naked and dead from unknown causes. Glet's boss, Cook County Sheriff Joe Lehman, fastens on Richie Fernandez, a machine operator and dishwasher who knew the Graves girls, as his top suspect but insists that he hasn't arrested Fernandez, who's gone missing. At length Rigg digs up a pair of witnesses to the arrest, but shortly after the Pink runs the story, a search for the witnesses comes up empty, putting Rigg in hot water that feels awfully familiar. As he deals with his memories of his murdered wife, the avatars of the local law, and Luther Donovan, the wealthy developer intent on squeezing every dollar out of the Examiner before he tosses it away, Rigg finds only two possible sources of consolation: his unlikely liaison with Aria Gamble, the glamorous features reporter who's been exiled to the Pink along with him, and the fact that so many suspects and antagonists are dying all around him. The mystery takes a back seat to the hero's scorched-earth battles with authority figures more powerful than he is.

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February 3, 2020
This strong series launch from Fredrickson (the Dek Elstrom series) introduces Milo Rigg, once “Chicago’s premier crime reporter.” Now, thanks to his involvement in a recent scandal, Milo has been reduced to writing “non-news, uncredited” for a small paper in a Chicago suburb. One cold, gray winter day, Milo happens to be in the neighborhood of a crime scene. The bodies of 15-year-old Beatrice Graves and her 12-year-old sister, Priscilla, have been thrown into a ravine. “They lay nude, like contorted marble mannequins, whiter than the melting snow.” The murders share certain similarities with a still unsolved case that occurred the year before. Milo is sure that the mishandling of evidence on the part of the sheriff and the medical examiner has let a murderer go free. While doggedly pursuing every lead, Milo must also deal with his grief over the death of his wife, who was shot “by a punk firing at someone else, or maybe just up in the air, in anger at the world.” Readers will look forward to spending more time with the complex, intriguing Milo. This skillfully crafted and richly nuanced crime novel bodes well for future entries. Agent: John Silbersack, Bent Agency.

January 1, 2020
Like the wounded warrior back from war in the Middle East, the newspaper reporter gobsmacked by what's become of his profession has become a familiar figure in modern crime fiction. Milo Riggs, the newshound star of this perplexing novel, has watched as his Chicago newspaper is bought by a real-estate billionaire determined to savage it. Milo's newsroom is an abandoned beauty parlor, and Milo now covers "school boards, pet parades, zoning battles." Even worse, rivals have gathered (bogus) evidence that he was having an affair with a murder victim's mother. That doesn't help when he investigates killings with distressing similarities to that case. A perfect setup for a procedural, and Frederickson delivers a solid one, although readers will need to be patient with some exasperating overwriting that drags down the momentum. Still, the clues are well camouflaged, and there's a blast of an ending begging to be argued about. Would a newspaper really publish all that conjecture? Note that Milo doesn't give all the blame for the trashing of newspapers to the greedheads. Those newspapers' readers could have demanded better but didn't(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)