Magic Line

January 30, 2012
Sarah Burke looks into a botched drug stash house raid that results in five bodies and a house filled with bullet holes in Gunn’s engaging fourth mystery featuring the Tucson, Ariz., homicide detective (after 2011’s Kissing Arizona). A quick police response nets video of a fleeing man, hapless Zebulon Montgomery Butts, but the real surprise is that one of the “dead,” Robin Brady, escapes while being rushed to the hospital. Burke and her cohorts must use all the tools at their disposal to identify and capture Zeb and Brady. Meanwhile, Brady, the raid’s mastermind, uses his wits and daring to elude the police, and Zeb stumbles into a haven doing odd jobs for elderly, feisty Doris Duncan. Brady earns the police’s reluctant admiration, while Zeb’s predicament earns the reader’s sympathy. Gunn pulls it all together in a satisfying fashion that should entice readers to seek earlier titles in the series. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency.

March 1, 2012
A dead perp gets up and hightails it away from the murder scene. There's been carnage at the stash house: two dead inside, two more outside. Tucson homicide detective Sarah Burke, who catches the case, is mortified when one of the men she and the ME thought was dead starts breathing, then escapes from the gurney transporting him to the hospital. At the cop shop, they start calling him "the ex-dead-guy" while they piece together how the home invasion went down, put names to all the players and work out which gun offed which perp. Lo and behold, it turns out that the ex-dead-guy hasn't been the only one to get away. Zeb, a petty thief making a move up in crime, ran off just as the mayhem began, winding up on a bus stop bench next to an old woman who offers him a few bucks if he carries her groceries home. Meanwhile, the ex-dead Robin, the mastermind who planned the drug house break-in, holes up in a parking garage while he plots what to do next. A chance meeting in a bar leads Robin to Zeb, while routine police work lands Sarah in their orbit just in time for one more death and one act of valor from a surprising source. Like Kissing Arizona (2011, etc.), a stolid, earnest police procedural with a shade too much information about Sarah's domestic arrangements.

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February 15, 2012
Zebulon Butts is a failure. His mother and sister have kicked him out of their homes, and he doesn't know what to do. Hanging out with his buddy, Robin, a stone-cold criminal planning to rob a stash house, seems to be a good way to prove himself. When Tucson detective Sarah Burke and her team are called to a shootout with multiple deaths on a quiet residential street, it appears to be a home invasion gone wrong. But after one of the apparently dead victims gets up and escapes, and another man is seen running away from the scene, Sarah realizes that there's more going on here than first appeared. Quirky characters, a fast-moving plot, and a strong female sleuth add up to a solid effort from a veteran crime author.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)