All these ashes

Once-thriving journalist/private-eye Russell Avery (who appeared in the series debut, Line of Sight, 2020) has hit the skids. After being laid off from his reporting job and losing his cop contacts, Avery now depends on freelance gigs for the New York City tabloids. The first part of this mystery is superb in showing the kind of sleazily brilliant tactics Avery uses to get the quote/photo from fresh victims of tragedy, what he calls "stenography with a splash of breaking and entering." Russell is a wry commentator on how his near-poverty leads him to tricking victims and hating himself. What seems like salvation comes in the form of an about-to-retire police lieutenant (every other cop has shunned him after Russell exposed a police scandal). The lieutenant wants Russell to investigate a decades-old cold case, in which four Black teens were savagely murdered. Avery's efforts to exonerate the man Avery believes was wrongly convicted and imprisoned, and to find the true murderer(s), leads him afoul of Newark City Hall, a mayoral race, and the police. This is a story as much about Avery's ethics as it is about his investigation. Queally, himself a former crime reporter for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey, brings both reporting expertise and novelistic flair to this second Avery mystery. Absorbing throughout.

In Queally's outstanding sequel to 2020's Line of Sight, PI Russell Avery, a former reporter who once covered the police beat for a Newark, N.J., newspaper, agrees to look into a cold case for police lieutenant Bill Henniman. In 1996, four teens--sisters Shayna and Adriana Bell, and two male cousins of theirs--vanished on the same night in Newark. In the weeks and months that followed, Shayna and Adriana's older sister, Cynthia, was able to stir up some press attention, but the case went nowhere. Not until 2012 did a snitch tell Henniman that Cynthia's ex-boyfriend, Abel Musa, admitted to trapping the teenagers in a building that he then torched. Shayna was threatening to tell her parents Musa was sleeping with her, and the other three were collateral damage in Musa's effort to silence Shayna. Musa was convicted of murder, but now, with Musa dying of cancer, Henniman suspects he's innocent and wants Avery to investigate. Queally gets all the details right while populating the plot with believable characters. Fans of Bruce DeSilva's Liam Mulligan will clamor for more. Agent: James McGowan, BookEnds Literary. (Sept.)