BLOOD BETRAYAL

Near-concurrent police shootings rock Colorado.

During a routine patrol of a quiet residential neighborhood, Harry Cooper, a white officer with the Blackwater Falls Sheriff’s Department, shoots and kills Duante Young, a 20-year-old Black street artist whose spray paint Harry allegedly mistakes for a gun. That same evening in nearby Denver, another white cop shoots and kills a 22-year-old Latino bystander, Mateo Ruiz, in the course of a botched drug raid. Lt. Waqas Seif, head of the Denver Police Department’s Community Response Unit, instructs Det. Inaya Rahman and her CRU colleagues to focus on investigating the Blackwater Falls incident: “The [Denver] raid is the Drug Task Force’s business, not ours.” Then Inaya receives a visit from John Broda, a racist bully who terrorized and physically assaulted her when they worked together at the Chicago PD, prompting her exit. John’s son, Kelly, is the Denver cop indicated in Mateo’s murder and John wants Inaya’s help exonerating him. In exchange, John will produce evidence sufficient to convict a fellow CPD officer of beating a young Black man to death—a case Inaya abandoned upon leaving Illinois. Conflicted, she must now choose between obeying orders and righting past wrongs. Khan continues in the vein of her first Det. Inaya Rahman novel, Blackwater Falls (2022), bringing fresh relevance to the subgenre’s timeworn conventions. Melodramatic stereotypes pepper the intersectionally diverse cast, diminishing the effect of the twisty, multifaceted story and its thorny politics, but the care Khan takes in developing Duante and Mateo as nuanced characters largely compensates.

A penetrating, of-the-moment police procedural.