Thomas & Mercer
Featuring: Detective Sergeant Ralph Mulino; Leonard Mitchell; Eleanor Hill
256 pages ISBN: 1503938921 EAN: 9781503938922 Kindle: B01D04S0L8 Paperback / e-Book Add to Wish List
I'm entering the Hollow
City series at the second book,
which is not ideal, but we all grab interesting books when
we see them. The setting is Brooklyn in modern day and book
two is A FALLING KNIFE. To start we see the point of view
of a high-iron construction worker as the towers of NYC
gradually spread glass and steel towards the suburbs.
Leonard Mitchell is the press secretary at the Parks
Department, following an interesting and controversial
career. He now handles stories which include occasional
crime, and he's summoned to attend the scene of a
construction death. Leonard suspects that the safety
inspections had been marked up but not carried out; seems
the police think the same way. Detective Sergeant Ralph
Mulino is on the job, leading a special unit to root out
corruption.
I like that one of the team is new graduate cop Aurelia
Peralta, and the building developer is also female, Eleanor
Hill. She sees herself as providing a thousand apartments
in a district desperate for professional housing, with
affordable social housing as well. Eleanor is a lady of
colour and she's prepared to help rehouse less well off
locals and still turn a profit. Some protesters are
refusing to allow more building, and she believes they just
don't want their houses overlooked. Most of those involved
at the construction site are men however, and one of them
must know something. Mulino decides to let Mitchell help
investigate, because he wisely doesn't want to tread on the
wrong toes.
I was fascinated by how swiftly the scene was built for us;
the cast, motives, influences and locations. To flesh it
out, we get the intricacies of supervising a cop's personal
use of cellphone and computer issued by his department, and
issues surrounding the gentrification of old
neighbourhoods. Some of the characters are better than
others at doing their jobs, just like in life. And a seven
year old boy vanishes from his school yard, introducing
fresh suspense. I will definitely have to read the previous
book.
By sending his established, cynical sleuth Mitchell
undercover in the real estate industry, author Andrew Case
gives us a good look behind the scenes and demonstrates how
dangerous it would be to catch A FALLING KNIFE. Full marks
from me.
When dirty real estate money makes the world go round,
murder greases the wheels.
Something’s rotten in the borough of Brooklyn. And it’s not
just the wave of glossy condos pushing longtime residents
out of their neighborhoods. A construction worker has
plunged to his death, and suspicion has fallen on a fellow
hard hat for turning a crane into a killing machine. When
the suspect does a disappearing act, a pair of unlikely
partners reunite to chase him down.
Leonard Mitchell once investigated dirty cops, and Detective
Ralph Mulino was his target. Mulino was cleared. But Leonard
ran afoul of the system and ended up pushing paper for the
Parks Department. Now Mulino drafts him to infiltrate a real
estate mogul’s operation and expose a financial scam that
may be behind the murder. But when the suspected killer gets
tossed from a tenement roof, it seems the price of probing
the housing market might just be too high.