THE NURSE MURDERS

Even all that sun can't shed light on the dark crimes that plague Phoenix in 1936.

Gene Hammons, a city cop fired for keeping his eye a little too clearly on the ball, gets an unusual request from prospective client William Jordan: to deliver the $10,000 ransom demanded by the kidnapper of a teenage boy, though Jordan isn’t the boy’s uncle and won’t identify who he is. When Gene declines the case, Jordan hires teacher-turned-shamus Pamela Bradbury for the job. In the meantime, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enlists Gene as an informant on the city’s bountiful local crime scene. That scene instantly grows sadly richer with the fatal shooting of Gene’s would-be client, who’s really George Parris, a man with a richly checkered past, and the scalping of Caroline Emma Taft, whose death looks suspiciously like a couple of others in Little Rock in 1933 and El Paso last year. Joining forces first professionally and then romantically, Gene and Pamela struggle to unearth the links between the victims and rival gangsters Cyrus Cleveland and Gus Greenbaum. Their search is frustrated by the fact that their leading suspects keep getting killed, but eventually the Angel of Death, as the Arizona Republican dubs him, starts to taunt Gene over the phone. Talton juggles so many balls—period details, cameo appearances by a dozen historical figures, the city’s ongoing criminal culture, the crimes that especially catch the eye of Gene and Pamela, and the development of their relationship—that it’s no disgrace the mixture is marked by a wobbly focus that shifts abruptly between tight closeups on action sequences and summaries glossing over the connecting tissue.

The most surprising feature is an appendix that identifies more real-life characters than anyone will have recognized.