Laws of Wrath

March 20, 2023
La Salle’s second thriller featuring NYPD detectives Phee Freeman and Quincy Cavanaugh (after 2022’s Laws of Depravity) is another nail-biter that never sacrifices character for plot. Freeman and Cavanaugh have become celebrities after stopping a killer who targeted New York clergy. Their moment of glory is derailed, though, by news that Freeman’s older sibling A.J. has been murdered: the killer removed A.J.’s eyelids and internal organs before abandoning the corpse in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Freeman is wracked with guilt, having been estranged from A.J. for years, and winds up working on A.J.’s murder with Cavanaugh. The investigation gets even more complex when the partners learn that several murders with a similar m.o. were committed in Queens three years earlier. Police believed that killer was Daria Zibik, who’s since been incarcerated, and now fear a copycat is at work. La Salle treads lurid territory without straining credulity. Fans of Jeffery Deaver will be pleased. Agent: Rockelle Henderson, Rock Inked.

April 1, 2023
The grisly ritualistic murder of New York detective Phee Freeman's tricking, cross-dressing brother, A.J., makes his investigation of a series of similar killings intensely personal. Phee is the younger son of powerful career criminal Clay Freeman, whose ruthlessness he inherited. After their recent killing of a serial murderer under questionable circumstances, Phee and his partner, Quincy Cavanaugh (whose own older brother, a priest, has dark secrets to hide), have been suspended from the force. But that won't stop Phee from going after A.J.'s killer, who also is the target of a new "Mirror Project" run by FBI agent Janet Maclin that temporarily releases convicts to help the feds catch criminals at large. The big question is whether the FBI's helper on this case, Harvard-educated Satanic cult leader and murderer Dr. Daria Zibik, is an asset or a lethal threat. Not for sensitive readers, the second installment in La Salle's Martyr Maker series, following Laws of Depravity (2022), has victims carved up while they are still alive--the better to "capture" the departing souls of the corpses. Though the dialogue and action scenes tend to be flatly rendered, La Salle, the former ER star, exerts a tight grip on his exceptionally bleak narrative, which strives for a Godfather-like dynamic in its family dramas. Everyone, it seems, has been touched by murder or suicide or physical abuse. Which is fine with Dr. Zibik, for whom retribution--as opposed to mere revenge--"puts us all on par with what you call God." A devilish thriller in which no one escapes the darkness.

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