A STEEP PRICE

The sixth case for Detective Tracy Crosswhite (Close to Home, 2017, etc.) poses a pair of unrelated but equally vexing problems for the Violent Crimes squad of the Seattle Police Department.

Monique Rodgers may not have been successful enough to warrant the label community activist, but it’s clear that she’s done all she’s ever going to do when someone shoots her down in broad daylight in her South Park neighborhood. Detective Vic Fazzio, whose wife has been stricken with another round of cancer, would dearly love to tie the murder to Little Jimmy, ne Ricardo Luis Bernadino Jiminez, a drug runner whose father, Big Jimmy, was stabbed to death six months after Faz sent him to prison. But the best evidence at the scene, a telltale handprint on a parked car, leads to a suspect who gets killed by Detective Andrea Gonzalez, a newcomer to A Team, before they can slap the cuffs on him. Meanwhile, Tracy, intent on concealing a pregnancy Gonzalez noticed literally within seconds of first meeting her, does a favor for Katie Pryor, a friend in Missing Persons, by talking to Aditi Dasgupta, a recent University of Washington graduate whose old friend and roommate, Kavita Mukherjee, has disappeared. The two cases couldn’t be more different. The first, which offers an obvious suspect and an obvious motive, runs into endless complications over Gonzalez’s fatal shot; the second, which heats up after Tracy and Pryor find Kavita’s body in a disused well, is a whodunit that will cast suspicion on pretty much everyone who knew the victim, whose determination to apply to medical school instead of allowing her family to arrange her marriage turns out to be far from her only act of defiance.

Dugoni (The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, 2018, etc.) winds up both cases satisfactorily, if not very compellingly or brilliantly, in this solid grade-B procedural.