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Edgy and raw, this is Book 4 in the Black Harbor series, and the first this reader has had the pleasure to read.
Hazel Rydelle, our first-person POV narrator, is an ex-police-transcriber and and ex-occupant of Black Harbor, Milwaukee, — by her accounts a terrible place; black at heart; rife with crime, poverty, and violence; and all in all a brutally unsettling location she was happy to escape (with her life) eight years ago.
Upon the sudden violent death of her ex-husband, Tommy Greenlee, Hazel, now in NY, finds herself uncontrollably drawn back to Black Harbor. Could this be as much for Sgt Nikolai Kole, he with “eyes the color of frost, too good looking for my own damn good”, a Black Harbor man Hazel still loves and fears for the power he has over her?
Nik’s world, (now assumed by Hazel), is a dark and gritty one, (shared with the reader in his own third-person POV voice) as he leads the BHPD Violent Crime Task Force. Nik’s cases mainly intersect with the city’s underbelly, inhabited by a slew of drug addicts, criminals and powerful overlords, leveraging Lake Michigan to inundate Black Harbor with a deluge of the horrifically potent Xombie, an exponentially-potent opioid-like drug that cannot be managed with narcane.
Without giving the plot away, this is a complex, unflinching and well-crafted police procedural, peopled with cops and criminals so authentic it’s no coincidence this author is a former police transcriber herself. As Hazel and Nik, along with his team of colleagues, encounter a host of brutal, vicious, and downright terrifying characters (and more than one homicide to solve), a claustrophobically tense race to the finish unwinds dramatically, (with several good twists), leading to a grand finale which is satisfying on a couple of levels.
With oodles of intriguing backstory hinted at and touched upon, it would be recommended to read the previous books first — you won’t want to miss a beat on the tangled and treacherous path each of these characters has previously encountered.
A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
