The Last Dark Place

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 ).