Description:
Fey Croaker, star of this and three previous mysteries in Paul Bishop's increasingly interesting series, has just been promoted to lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. Fey and her team have been reassigned to the elite Robbery-Homicide Department and charged with solving the high-profile slaying of Bianca Flynn, a prominent woman lawyer as well as the daughter of a powerful judge and the sister of a police commissioner. Flynn's obsession with the victims of parental sexual abuse was clearly the motive for her murder, and this resonates at a very personal level with Fey, whose father molested her throughout her childhood. When Ellis "Jack" Kavanaugh, her father's former partner, dies and leaves her a fortune in marked bills traced to a robbery over two decades old, she is forced to confront a part of her past she believed she had come to terms with long ago. Unraveling the connection between Kavanaugh's cryptic dying words and the murder of Flynn, who ran an underground railroad for sexually threatened children, takes the tough but vulnerable Fey on a tumultuous personal journey. Her sojourn rivets the reader's attention and illuminates Bishop's skill at characterization as well as pace and plotting. While Fey is the soul of this excellent crime novel, the secondary figures are almost as compelling, particularly Hammer and Nails, the married detectives on Fey's crew, and Brink Kavanaugh, a charismatic artist to whom Fey is almost fatally attracted. Chalk Whispers confirms Bishop's place in the pantheon of writers like Joseph Wambaugh and Michael Connelly, as well as an earlier generation of pros like Ross MacDonald, who uncovered the corruption beneath Los Angeles's glossy exterior. --Jane Adams
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