Trigger City

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

Trigger City, by Sean Chercover, was the other great recommendation I mentioned last week.  It's a suspense novel that hits the genre bullseye:  tough but damaged hero still fighting flashbacks to his last case, mysterious enemies arrayed against him, helpless victims he has to keep from becoming collateral damage, and the girl he wants to win back.  Everything you need in a p.i. novel, with plenty of thrills and that essential spark.

Chicago PI Ray Dudgeon isn’t back to 100% after taking on the mob (Big City, Bad Blood), so he really needs the income when Colonel Isaac Richmond (US Army Ret.) asks him to look into his daughter’s death.

No one disputes how Joan Richmond died.  The computer expert she hired for her company’s payroll department shot her to death, raving obsessively, and then committed suicide.  It isn’t the facts of her death that the colonel wants to know, but more about his daughter’s life.  Their relationship wasn’t close, what with his wife’s death and his own close-mouthed career in military intelligence.

So Ray goes looking. And what he finds is not the random violence of a paranoid schizophrenic.

Killer and victim had worked together at a highly secretive and tightly wound military contract company, a company that is currently being investigated by Congress.  Naturally, Dudgeon assumes there's a motive in there somewhere. 

But investigating the lead puts Ray’s life in danger, as well as the life of the killer’s widow.  Ray can handle himself and can probably protect the widow, but can he handle the way his friends and allies are being stripped away as he works the case?  What’s going on, and how can Ray fight his way out of the shadowy world of military intelligence?

It's a classic plot told with classic panache.  Readers who don't mind their suspense with a real edge of violence will find this plenty atmospheric.