BENEATH THE VEIL OF VENGEANCE

In Golden’s thriller, a cop investigates the killing of a prominent journalist and discovers a vast criminal conspiracy.

When Elaine Cross, a reporter known as the “city’s loudest voice against corruption,” is murdered, Det. Mara Ellis suspects that her death is connected to a story that she was investigating. She and her partner, Will Novak, discover that the victim had uncovered a powerful criminal network, unimaginatively called the Syndicate, which runs the unnamed city. The group’s enforcer, Kane,a “power broker, a puppet master who operated in the shadows,” is surely behind Elaine’s killing, and the man who pulled the trigger, a mysterious hit man known only as Wraith, is now setting his sights on Ellis. The deeper that Ellis digs, the more she discovers that Elaine had hard evidence against the Syndicate, including a top city official who claims to have been helping Elaine, but may actually be working both sides. Even after several attempts on her life, Ellis doggedly persists in her investigation and plots revenge against her tormentors, despite repeated warnings from her concerned partner. Over the course of Golden’s novel, readers will find that the central virtue of the narrative is its clarity; the plot is complex and has an unpredictable ending, but readers will never feel lost. That said, they may find that much of the novel feels derivative, with scenes and set pieces that will feel overly familiar to dedicated genre fans. Wraith, in particular, comes across as a cartoonish villain of the sort who delivers conveniently information-rich monologues immediately before attempting to kill off the protagonist; even Ellis finds herself asking him, “Why tell me this?”

A brief, straightforward, and unfortunately uninspired detective novel.