This is the first crime novel that was written by Barbara Fister and I was finally able to track down a copy to buy and read, several weeks after I had read her 2nd book, In the Wind. This is also a police procedural with the protagonist a detective, Konstantin Slovo, who is currently on leave from the Chicago PD and under suspicion in the shooting death of his former partner. He is trying to restore a precarious emotional balance as well as recover from a serious gunshot wound he received in the same incident. On the flip of a coin, he heads east and stumbles into a small Maine town that is nearing mass hysteria after the kidnapping and murders of two young girls. The focus is on plot and the complex social psychology of groups getting crazy for any sort of action in the face of such horrible events that seem so out of their control. Slovo is haunted by the child abuse cases he has investigated in the past, especially the last one that he could never solve; it is therefore especially ironic that he becomes a victim of the town's vigilante group that is taking matters into their own hands. In the process of trying to help with the investigation--unofficially of course--he befriends local doctor Hari Chakravarty (the only source of any humor in the tale), the chief of police's daughter Ruth, and, it turns out, the killer.
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