The Corruptions

November 14, 2016
In Zandri’s gritty fourth Jack Marconi thriller (after 2015’s The Guilty), New York’s governor, Leon Valente, asks the prison warden turned PI to capture two self-proclaimed psychopaths and convicted cop-killers who have escaped from Clinton Maximum Security Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y. Valente wants the fugitives alive, before the state troopers or the FBI can get them. Marconi enlists the aid of his trusty sidekick, Black, once a pro-football player and former inmate at the prison over which Marconi presided. After a few nasty run-ins with state trooper Vincent D’Amico and some more amiable encounters with Sheriff Bridgette Hylton, Marconi begins to think there’s something more going on than just two cons who wanted to jump the prison walls. The camaraderie and knockabout verbal style between Marconi and Black make their scenes together thoroughly enjoyable and create a welcome relief from the violence and decadence that they uncover as they make their way through a tangled web of corruption, perversion, and greed. Agent: Chip MacGregor, MacGregory Literary.

January 1, 2017
Jack Marconi, the former prison warden who makes his living as a PI, returns in this fourth novel in the series. He and his partner, an ex-con who goes by the name of Blood, are hired by the governor of New York to find two murderers who escaped from Dannemora, the notoriousand, up to this point, unescapablemaximum-security prison. The two investigators anticipate some resistance; they're walking into some cop's jurisdiction, walking into some warden's prison, announcing that they intend to find the bad guys when hundreds of cops have already failed. As they try to figure out where the missing men have gone, Jack and Blood also begin to see that something is seriously not right at Dannemora, but they don't expect that it's one of the escaped killers who will point them in the right direction, at the real villains of the story. Jack and Blood make a good team (expect plenty of witty banter), and the story is well constructed, with a niceif deeply unsettlingplot twist near the end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)