EVERY KIND OF WICKED

Forensic specialist Maggie Gardiner investigates a series of murders as baffling as they are terrifying.

The first victim looks like a run-of-the-mill mugging: a young man shot to death in the Erie Street Cemetery. But his wounds aren’t gunshot wounds. And when Jack Renner and Thomas Riley, the detectives assigned to the case, identify the victim as Evan Harding, a Cleveland State student, Maggie can’t figure out what he was doing on Erie Street, which is far from the path between his part-time job at A to Z Check Cashing and the dorm where he lived with his girlfriend, Shanaya Thomas. A second body with similar wounds makes the case even more confusing. According to his driver’s license, the deceased is Marlon Toner. But Marlon’s sister, Jennifer, points out that like her, Marlon is black, while the picture on the ID and the corpse who was carrying it are not. Jennifer has her own ax to grind: She’s pissed that although Marlon’s not the dead guy the police found outside West Side Market, someone’s prescribing her brother so many opioids that the next corpse might actually be his. Finding out that the detective investigating the West Side murder is her ex-husband, Rick, doesn’t really make juggling the two cases any harder for Maggie. Her relationship with Renner is even more complicated than her relationship with her ex. But as the bodies pile up, the interconnected cases become more personal for Maggie, who finds herself enmeshed in a maze of crimes as twisted as they are twisty.

First-rate plotting and a compelling cast of characters.