A VISIBLE DARKNESS

Though he’s buried himself in a shack on the edge of the Everglades, Max Freeman still can’t forget the death of his father, his years as a Philadelphia cop battling the likes of Gary Heidnik and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the shooting that left an underage robber dead and him headed south on disability. But events are conspiring again to pull his present into sharper focus than his past. His longtime friend and attorney, Billy Manchester, comes to him with a wild tale of elderly black Fort Lauderdale women being murdered for their insurance policies—policies that have been bought up by an eminently reputable viatical investment firm that has every reason to want the policyholders dead. And if that story fails to get Max’s attention, the government is trying to evict him from his shack and force him to live among his own kind. Because the evidence indicates a killer who can move among the black neighborhoods virtually invisible, Max’s challenge—which he shares with Tidewater Insurance investigator Frank McCane and, once more, with Sherry Richards of the Strategic Investigations Division—is to find the links between a law-abiding Delaware corporation and a stone killer who’s known some of his victims since childhood. He finds them uncomfortably close to home.

King continues to write as powerfully as in his striking debut, The Blue Edge of Midnight (2002). But Max had better husband his horrific memories of the City of Brotherly Love, or he may find that he’s using them up faster than he can catch new cases.