THE LONG WAY OUT

After a five-year hiatus that Wiley devoted to franchise hero Sam Kelson, ex-con Franky Dast returns for another shot at getting his life straightened out and incidentally solving some murders.

It’s easy to see why the author’s left Franky to stew in the Florida heat for so long. Even though he didn’t commit the heinous crimes for which Police Det. Bill Higby sent him to death row, he’s not exactly likable. When Alejandra Soto asks him to look into the sudden disappearance of her 14-year-old daughter, he declines and doesn’t change his mind until Antonia Soto’s found shot to death in Clapboard Creek. Higby and his somewhat less hostile partner, Lt. Det. Deborah Holt, are convinced the killer is Carlos Medina, the older boyfriend who got Antonia pregnant. But Franky thinks the murder is the work of someone with a deeper animus, and his suspicions are fueled by racist city councilman Randall Lehmann, whom he knocks down at a pro-immigration rally staged by attorney Demetrius Jones as the TV cameras roll. None of this endears Franky to his old nemesis, who’s unconvinced by the murder of Kumar Mehta that all this could have something to do with race. After all, Mehta was a model South Asian, a successful man in town to visit his equally successful children. The cops don’t get it even when someone scrawls racist graffiti on the walls of Franky’s hotel room and ensures his ouster by tossing a Molotov cocktail at the place. The abduction of Cynthia, Franky’s hypermetabolic lover, kicks the case into high gear, but still not for the police.

A searing portrait of an acknowledged lowlife bent on doing God’s work.