Review by Booklist Review
An anonymous alert sends Sacramento PD to a local church. It's eerily quiet when they arrive . . . until a bomb goes off. Sergeant Brian Conner, love interest of SPD Detective Emily Hunter (last seen in River of Lies, 2025), suffers a traumatic brain injury requiring emergency surgery. Emily is devastated, but worse is to come. Another bomb goes off, this one not only injuring cops but also killing a prominent gang member. Opinionated Councilman Rob Daniels claims the police are inept at best and dangerous at worst; he wants to defund them and assign amateur militia groups to patrol the neighborhoods. Emily is determined to find the bomber, but she soon becomes the next target. Known for her take-no-prisoners style of policing, she unravels a tangled plot involving illegal gun sales, corruption, and a man hell-bent on avenging his family's death. With a frank look at the challenges of modern policing and the officers often caught in both gunfire and political crossfire, L'Etoile's latest offers a feisty, tenacious, clever heroine and a suspenseful plot leavened with sardonic humor for a can't-put-it-down read.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
L'Etoile's third procedural featuring Sacramento, Calif., police detective Emily Hunter (after River of Lies) is the series' best yet. At the outset, Emily's romantic relationship with her colleague Brian Conner is on the rocks after she declines to move in with him. The situation gets more fraught when Brian responds to a fake 911 call that lures him to a church, which the caller then bombs. When Emily reaches the hospital where Brian is being treated for a traumatic brain injury, she learns she's been named his medical proxy, leaving his life in her hands. As she waits for Brian's condition to improve, she tries to track down his attacker, with the help of her colleagues on the Sacramento PD. They initially link the bombing to California politician Rob Davis, a vocal opponent of the police, but the bomber's further attempts on the lives of more cops suggests a desire for revenge that transcends politics. L'Etoile maintains nerve-jangling tension throughout while adding significant depth to Emily's characterization as she grapples with Brian's fate. Fans of Alafair Burke's Ellie Hatcher novels should check this out. (Jan.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A series of explosions rocks Sacramento in general and Det. Emily Hunter in particular. Shortly after she indicates that she's not yet ready to move in with Sgt. Brian Conner, Emily learns that he's near death after someone, or something, detonates a device after he responded to a false report of violence at a neighborhood church. Brian survives the attack and eventually comes out of his coma minus a few internal organs--but the bomber has only just started. Spurred by a second attack on two of her colleagues, Emily and her team, aided by computer geek Officer Clay Milton, trace the likely source of the components to Full Charge Electronics, which is owned by City Councilman Rob Davis, a vocal opponent of the city's police, whom he insists are disrupting the peace they claim to be promoting. This lead blows up in their faces, though, when Davis is killed in a car bombing and his widow threatens to sue the police department, which is already under siege from several directions, from gang warfare to funding cuts to public opinion. The label on a file Davis had grabbed to take to his car moments before his death alerts Emily to a fatal but long-forgotten SWAT team incident in which Brian had taken part, and the trail leads to a suspect who's never forgotten that incident, which left the rest of his family dead. Just as other procedurals would be winding down, however, L'Etoile is gearing up for further complications, revelations, and reversals, and complacent readers who assume they've finally figured it all out will have another think coming, and then another after that. Everything you read police stories for is here, and much, much more. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
