SHOOT THE WOMAN FIRST

An easy score for professional thief Crissa Stone (Kings of Midnight, 2012, etc.) and her associates turns out to be anything but.

Detroit drug lord Marquis Jackson is so confident that nobody’s going to mess with his drop-off for dirty cash that he takes minimal precautions to safeguard it or even to keep it secret. He doesn’t reckon with Cordell King, an underling who’s just old and smart enough to share information about the cash with Crissa, her veteran colleague Larry Black, and Cordell’s own cousin Charlie Glass. Though Crissa and company don’t have much time to plan the heist, it goes off smooth as silk, until it doesn’t, and Crissa is on the run with a lot more money than she expected to be carrying and a determination to deliver half of it—$80,000—to Claudette, a stranger in Florida, and her daughter, Haley, 6. The women don’t exactly bond, and Crissa’s particularly uneasy about Claudette’s current boyfriend, Roy Mapes, a meth addict who’s seriously in debt to a pair of lowlife dealers. Back in Detroit, Marquis Jackson, who’s not about to take the theft lying down, offers ex-cop Frank Burke $10,000 if he can recover the loot before Jackson’s own confederates, who are better enforcers than detectives. Burke proves just as violent as Jackson’s underlings but a lot less loyal. He dutifully tracks down the survivors of the heist but executes them as quickly as he finds them and plots to keep the entire proceeds for himself. That plan will inevitably bring him up against Crissa and that Florida family, and when it does, sparks will fly, along with bullet casings of every caliber.

Crissa’s third is another superior thriller—fast, tough and nasty—without a single extra sentence.