CANE AND ABE

A stand-alone from the creator of adventurous lawyer Jack Swyteck (Black Horizon, 2014, etc.) that plumbs a Miami prosecutor’s nightmare when a serial killer strikes a little too close to home.

The Cutter, as he’s been dubbed, has used a machete on four white women who’d dated black men, capping his gruesome murders by sprinkling ashes on his victims’ foreheads. So why is his fifth victim highflying black attorney Tyla Tomkins, and where are the ashes this time? These are big problems, but Abe Beckham, a white senior trial counsel at the Miami-Dade Office of the State Attorney, is preoccupied with a more personal problem: how much FBI agent Victoria Santos, who’s coordinating the hunt for the Cutter, will find out about his own relationship with Tyla. Abe, who married his old girlfriend Angelina after his African-American first wife, Samantha Vine, died, already has his hands full with Samantha’s bipolar older brother, J.T., whose erratic behavior is constantly testing the promise Abe made his dying wife to look after him. Now he finds himself pondering possible links between the killings and the powerful Cortinas Sugar company and stressing out when Santos uncovers evidence that he’d seen Tyla a lot more recently than he’d told either her or Angelina. The pot comes to a rolling boil when Angelina vanishes shortly after capping a fight with Abe by throwing him out of their house. Has Abe killed his missing wife? Is her disappearance an attempt to incriminate him? Is Abe the Cutter? Did he kill Tyla as a copycat? And if he isn’t and he didn’t, who’s gone to such trouble to frame him?

If only the answers to these questions were as good as the questions. As it is, Grippando supplies a satisfyingly wild ride through Presumed Innocent territory before the inevitable letdown.