THE MAGIC LINE

A dead perp gets up and hightails it away from the murder scene.

There’s been carnage at the stash house: two dead inside, two more outside. Tucson homicide detective Sarah Burke, who catches the case, is mortified when one of the men she and the ME thought was dead starts breathing, then escapes from the gurney transporting him to the hospital. At the cop shop, they start calling him “the ex-dead-guy” while they piece together how the home invasion went down, put names to all the players and work out which gun offed which perp. Lo and behold, it turns out that the ex-dead-guy hasn’t been the only one to get away. Zeb, a petty thief making a move up in crime, ran off just as the mayhem began, winding up on a bus stop bench next to an old woman who offers him a few bucks if he carries her groceries home. Meanwhile, the ex-dead Robin, the mastermind who planned the drug house break-in, holes up in a parking garage while he plots what to do next. A chance meeting in a bar leads Robin to Zeb, while routine police work lands Sarah in their orbit just in time for one more death and one act of valor from a surprising source. Like Kissing Arizona (2011, etc.), a stolid, earnest police procedural with a shade too much information about Sarah’s domestic arrangements.