Jan Grape Dark Blue Death

Dark Blue Death

Jan Grape

Five Star, Nov 2005, $25.95, 290 pp.

ISBN: 1594143218

Austin Police Department Commander Lianne Crowder orders Zoe Barrow to spend a month as an instructor at the Citizen Police Academy where the APD operates an intensive twelve week program that brings in solid cadets and provides public awareness. Zoe enjoys seeing her old patrol pal Anne Panzarella who works there and the role playing with wannabe cops. The fun times end when Cadet Robert Nottingham informs Zoe that someone shot and killed Cadet Ramona Sanchez in a classroom near the firing range.

Zoe questions Nottingham who explains that he and Ramona were rehashing the role playing they participated in and she sadly said she was gong to wash out of the school; suddenly a bullet came through the window and hit her in the head. The killing reminds Zoe of her spouse Byron a cop shot in the line of duty by a gangbanger; Byron lives in an infant's state at Pecan Grove, but when she arrives there he is missing. While Zoe and her partner Sergeant Harry Albright work the cadet murder and additional related killings from a serial sniper, she also searches for her spouse who could never have walked away on his own.

The insights into genuine APD often tragic occurrences add a sense of reality to this absorbing serial sniper police procedural. Zoe is obviously the star as she and her partner work the difficult investigation while disagreeing over the FBI looking over their shoulders at the same time she is upset over her missing husband (though some readers might feel the vanished spouse is over kill). Jan Grape provides an astute Austin City Blues thriller (see AUSTIN CITY BLUE) that will have her audience clamoring for more.

Harriet Klausner