Flame Out

March 30, 2015
Cooley’s solid second police procedural featuring former FBI special agent June Lyons (after 2014’s Ice Shear) finds June, now a cop in her hometown of Hopewell Falls, N.Y., not quite over the death of her husband, Kevin, three years earlier—and facing a welter of crimes involving the volatile Ukrainian-American family of her police partner, Dave Batko. Soon after June saves a woman from a burning abandoned clothing factory, a mummified body is found in a sealed barrel walled up in the factory’s basement. The two cases intertwine in a complex and not always convincing plot that twists its lengthy way through sibling rivalries and other tensions, such as June’s vacillation over rejoining the Bureau, and her problematic relationship with her aging hippie mother. Though a little heavy-handed with June’s emotional flare-ups, Cooley does well by Ukrainian culture and cuisine, while assuring readers that today’s women cops and perps can both be tougher than their male counterparts. Agent: Lisa Gallagher, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

May 1, 2015
In this follow-up to Ice Shear (2014), widowed cop June Lyons struggles to decide whether to stay in her comfortable job as a police officer in the small town where she grew up or risk spending more time away from her young daughter by rejoining the FBI. When Officer Lyons pulls a mystery woman from a fire at a local factory, she never imagines that what is inside will be more chilling than the burning flesh she carried out of the flames. She couldn't be more wrong. Investigators not only find barrels of a banned chemical sealed inside a wall, but inside one of the steel drums they also find the body of a local woman who has been missing for decades. The factory's owner, Bernie Mede, is currently in prison for having killed his wife and child, although their bodies were never found. Will these recent revelations expose Mede as a serial killer or exonerate him altogether? The answers lie somewhere within a close-knit group of Ukrainian immigrants who live on the other side of the Mohawk River and have a history of solving problems among themselves. Another fast-paced procedural with a smart, empathetic female lead and a crisply evoked setting.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)