Description:
There's something very old-fashioned about Robert J. Randisi's East of the Arch. While its serial-killer plot certainly offers some gripping moments, the characters--from the edge-treading lead cop to its self-absorbed politicians--are straight out of the How to Write Police Procedurals manual. And its principal perpetrator bears not even a hint of a redeeming quality. That Randisi nonetheless manages to keep one reading attests to the time-oiled ease of his prose. Joe Keough (introduced in 1995's Alone with the Dead) is a former New York City homicide detective, now living in St. Louis and doing mind-numbing security work for that city's mayor. But East of the Arch finds his expertise in solving serial slayings needed across the Mississippi, in the bad-rep Illinois burg of East St. Louis, where two women have been murdered during the forcible removal of their unborn children. Struggling to avoid myriad distractions, including a job offer in Washington, D.C., and rumors of abuse within the prospective foster family of a boy he helped more than a year before (see In the Shadow of the Arch), the instinct-driven Keough and an eager young local detective search for a sociopathic misogynist who is already nurturing his next victim--"his crowning achievement." Though Randisi's history as an administrative assistant with the NYPD informs his storytelling, East of the Arch is too predictable, with a rapid summing-up that wastes the tension it had been progressively building. The 40-year-old Keough, an unsettled diabetic-in-denial, has all the makings of a thoroughbred series figure, but this novel doesn't give him the challenge he needs to show his strengths. --J. Kingston Pierce
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