DARK ALLEY

A sanitation supervisor hits the streets in search of a killer who plies his trade in Manhattan’s hidden courtyards.

When Garry Thomason disappears on his early-morning trash run to New Amsterdam Mews, near West 48th Street, his ex-socialite boss, Anna Winthrop (Evil Justice, 2009, etc.) is more than a little worried. When his body turns up the next day in the former colonial stables, turned into quaint row homes, she throws herself into the investigation, much to the disgust of Elena Rinaldi, the NYPD detective assigned to the case. Anna’s one step ahead of Rinaldi all the way. She ferrets out Garry’s connections to shoplifting queen Tally Klaw and to Zeus, a shadowy crack dealer. And she finds a clipping that links Iraq vet Thomason to the rape and murder of teenaged Neda Majeed in Baghdad, as well as photos that tie him to a local pornographer. After Thomason’s grandmother Evelyn is strangled in her apartment, Anna thinks the motive for murder must lie close to home—until a second body turns up in Amster Yard, a mews near East 49th Street. Unfortunately, day-care worker Yvette Ronson, who seems to have no connection to Garry’s sordid world, is a harbinger of things to come. Soon, corpses are cropping up in cloistered communities from midtown to the Village, and Anna must cast her net ever wider to catch a killer with a taste for narrow places.

Marshall crams enough crime into Winthrop’s latest case to burst the strongest Hefty bag.