The Last Dark Place
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
A veteran Chicago cop who’s also a mensch, “Lieberman is endearing, wise in his crochets, weary with his wisdom” (The Washington Post Book World).
Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower pulled a gun in a synagogue. He had come to avenge his brother, a two-bit hoodlum who’d been killed in a shootout with a young cop named Abe Lieberman. But Lieberman outsmarted him, and put Gower in jail. After serving his time, for the next few decades Gower bounced around the Chicago underworld, making a name for himself as a second-rate mob enforcer.
Fate is a funny thing. When Gower gets arrested in Yuma, Arizona, it’s an aged Abe Lieberman who goes to bring him home, leaving his longtime partner Bill Hanrahan back in the windy city to put up with the hot air of his racist substitute. Handcuffed to each other, Lieberman and his prisoner are about to board the plane when a geriatric janitor shuffles towards them and shoots Gower dead.
Connie Gower was scum, but killing him is still murder, and Lieberman is determined to find out who ordered the hit—and why.
Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky’s The Last Dark Place is “an entertaining crime novel that should send new readers in search of its predecessors” (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Edgar-winner Kaminsky's eighth Abe Lieberman mystery (after 2002's Not Quite Kosher) gets off to a dramatic start. After a prologue in which a gunman confronts a young Lieberman in the middle of a morning prayer service in 1969, the action flashes forward 33 years to find the sardonic 60-something Chicago cop handcuffed to the same gunman, a professional assassin facing extradition back to the Windy City. When an unassuming elderly janitor shocks the veteran lawman by gunning down the assassin in the airport, Lieberman takes on the thankless task of identifying the person who ordered the hit. As that inquiry proceeds, Lieberman tries to defuse a Latin-Asian gang war. Meanwhile, Lieberman's Irish partner, Bill Hanrahan, juggles a rape case and a stalker who's targeting his pregnant wife. Long on vigilante justice, the book succeeds more as a character study than as a whodunit, though the resolution of the sexual-assault inquiry does contain a decent twist. The confluence of the plot threads might strike some as far-fetched, but Kaminsky's sympathetic hero and his believable family relationships make this an entertaining crime novel that should send new readers in search of its predecessors. FYI:The author of more than 50 books, Kaminsky also writes the Lew Fonseca, Toby Peters and Porfiry Rostnikov mystery series.
