The Red Book begins with a notorious K-Town drive-by shooting in Chicago that takes the lives of three gang members and two innocents. One of the innocents is a woman who appears to be in the wrong place at the wrong time; the other is a young girl who was killed by a stray bullet.
The Police are under intense political pressure to solve it, so when Detective Billy Harvey is assigned to the Special Operations Section (SOS) to stop the gang violence on the West Side, he finds the case lands on his table. Together with his new partner Detective Carla Griffin, whom colleagues consider “toxic” since she is a pill popper, Harvey moves fast to solve the case.
Prior to his new appointment to the SOS, Harvey’s daughter had died and his wife had committed suicide, all on the same day. The double tragedies happened four years earlier. Harvey had also been shot in the head, charged with murder (and exonerated), and helped put his own father in prison for corruption.
All the while, Harvey is able to deal with his wife’s actions until he finds himself on the verge of discovering that she didn’t take her own life after all. He then follows a trail of twists and turns that eventually leads him to the shocking discovery that tied his wife’s death to the current killings. Include finding the little red book kept by his father with a listing of names and money he had taken as Chief Detective.
Meanwhile, the captain in Internal Affairs, Dennis Porter is in the pocket of some powerful guys who run an international human trafficking ring, and he hates Harvey. But Harvey is lucky to have Patti, his twin sister and fellow detective, who helps him out in the final leg of his investigation.
James Patterson and co-author David Ellis put their characters through hell in this hard-edged second installment of their Black Book series. There are many nasty surprises that will hold the reader’s rapt attention in this dark, violent, and fast-moving thriller.