GIRLS, CRIMES & THE RULING BODY

After witnessing the prelude to a young woman’s murder, an assemblyman’s chief of staff gets caught up in an investigation in Ziman’s tense political novel.

New York City politico Ryan McNeil witnesses state legislators debate the death penalty, and his boss, Assemblyman Nickolas Somatos, reads out Ryan’s impassioned speech against it. Out on the street, Ryan sees Kathy Wilet enter a limousine; readers find out that her boyfriend murdered her with a golf club not long afterward, after they discussed some secret files. As part of an investigation into her disappearance, Ryan gives his witness statement to a police detective, who’s skeptical about Ryan’s timeline of events. Ryan’s girlfriend, Caroline Tierney,works at a law office in a support capacity, and they both embark on a hunt for the truth. As Ryan digs further into Kathy’s past, his actions prompt the governor to deem him a person of interest. Sometime later, Ryan marries Annie McNeil and moves to Washington, D.C., to work for Somatos, who’s become a member of Congress. Back in New York, Caroline continues to probe financial leads in her investigation, which leads her to an arsonist and some very bad actors in the governor’s office. It all ends with multiple unexpected deaths of major characters. At times over the course of the narrative Ziman’s writing style reveals some distracting quirks, as when he introduces his characters fragmentarily, with details about their names, dispositions, and bodily features separated by pages at a time. The author also has a tendency to veer into passive sentence constructions (“A dinner of shrimp, mussels and pasta had been consumed”) and to haphazardly switch between past and present tense, which can be distracting. In addition, some aspects of the plot add unnecessary complexity. That said, the pace of the story is consistently propulsive throughout, which is sure to maintain readers’ interest.

A sometimes-intriguing but often convoluted whodunit.