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Detective Jane Bauer, NYPD, is very close to retirement. She is working on what she hopes will be her last case before joining an insurance company as an executive at a higher rate of pay. A woman was found seated in a wheelchair, in City Hall Park, dead. SuddenDet Jane Bauerly, she is removed from that case and placed in a new squad, one devoted to solving cold cases. The new team is given a thick file. Four years earlier, a man was found dead in the vestibule of his apartment house. The building is a tenement on W. 56 Street, traditionally part of Hell's Kitchen but now yuppified to Clinton. A couple of phone calls later and a strange pattern emerges. None of the people who lived in the building 4 years before are there any longer. Anyone who knows New Yorkwould know that it takes more than a murder to make someone give up a rent-controlled apartment. On further inquiry, it appears that everyone who lived in that building at that time is now dead. This is a good solid police procedural with an engaging lead character in Jane Bauer, a woman about 40 contemplating several changes in her life--moving into a new apartment , leaving her job of twenty years, dealing with the new partners in the cold case unit. In a few words, the author sketches the secondary characters so that we care about them also. And the locations come alive,whether the neighborhoods of New York or the mean streets of Omaha. Harris' earlier series, 14 books all with a holiday murder theme, had an ex-nun as detective. I never tried any of those, but if they are as well constructed as MURDER IN HELL'S KITCHEN, I see I am going to have to search for them.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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