THE LAST GIG

In this sizzling latest from Green (Dead Cat Bounce, 2006, etc.), a Latina street kid turned shamus goes after an Irish mobster turned traitor.

Mickey Caughlan is one burned-up boss. Someone’s had the brass to hijack one of his Irish gangster family’s drug-bearing trucks. Worse: the rip-offs are ongoing, and the tip-offs, as he tells Alessandra Martillo, are evidently coming from inside the family. Why hire me? asks Al, a freshly minted shamus. Rookie she may be, but she has street cred, Caughlan assures her. He’s heard, for instance, that skinny Al has broken heads and collarbones with the best of the big-and-brawny set. Even more important, it’s said that she can “find a white cat in a snowstorm.” Al, who’s not so much skinny as tall, lean and “fine enough in her own way,” signs on posthaste, spurred by a bank account way south of skinny. What seemed straightforward enough in the telling, however, proves both complex and dangerous in the doing, and Al finds herself delving into a variety of family secrets, some dark, some deadly, some close to home.

She fights like a Valkyrie, loves hard, runs scared at times, stands tall when it matters, is sexy, endearing and just about the freshest heroine to enhance genre fiction in forever. Don’t miss her.