THE DEAD DON’T LIE

The results of Chicago’s latest crime spree, in the words of Det. Abe Lieberman, are “four dead Turks and one tired Jew.”

A late-night call brings Chicago’s most eccentric cop (Terror Town, 2006, etc.) to the body of Dr. Lemi Oraz Sahin, who’s been repeatedly stabbed. Why was a respected oncologist walking the streets at 3 a.m.? The only answers come from Erhan Turkalu, owner of the nearby Anatolia Restaurant, and soon he and his wife have been stabbed to death as well. Though Abe’s customary partner, Det. Bill Hanrahan, can’t join the festivities because he’s awaiting the imminent arrival of his baby, it turns out that he’s well-positioned at Woodrow Wilson Hospital, where he’s right on hand to protect Jonas Lindqvist, a manic pastry chef who’s been marked for death by both Robert E. Lee Chang, who’s already shot him, mistakenly thinking him a mugger, and the actual muggers, a husband-and-wife pair of boxers. The continued Turkish deaths have their roots in a possibly forged account of a much more sweeping carnage, the alleged genocide of Armenians by Turks, that isn’t quite as compelling as it means to be. But the pastry chef-boxers plot is done to a turn, and the domestic trimmings are all you’d expect of the most compassionate police procedurals in the business.

Lieberman’s tenth gives good weight, right down to a nicely inconclusive ending that makes more tightly woven conclusions seem amateurish.