A MURDER TOO CLOSE

A private eye tackles injustice on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Sam Epstein thinks Phil Rodriquez, who earned a tough-guy rep for nailing a rapist (Two Graves Dug, 2005), is just the PI to scare off his niece’s new boyfriend, a Hindu, or maybe a Muslim, who’s probably a terrorist about to blow up more of the city skyline. Phil barely has time to kick Epstein out of his office before the Taste of India, a restaurant the boy’s family owns, is torched. After blubbering that things have gotten out of hand, Epstein disappears, and his aged father hires Phil to find him. A scroll through computer files by Phil’s office partner, luscious lesbian Yolanda Aguierre, reveals several suspicious fires. In each case the burned-out owners were denied insurance payoffs because Homeland Security, on anonymous phone tips, was investigating them as terrorists. Meanwhile, Phil’s newest client, Mike Kallen, who’s obviously anglicized his name from its Eastern-bloc roots, seems to be running a sex-slave ring out of an apartment building. Two with information for Phil will die, one of his operatives will take a bullet meant for him and he’ll get a going-over by a tank-shaped goon—all this before a low-level Mafioso pinpoints Epstein’s location, Kallen is put out of business and the paranoia that’s been sweeping the Lower East Side since 9/11 starts to ease up.

An earnest, heavy-handed look at bigotry with a polyglot cast representing most ethnicities.