Rating: 5 stars (Spotlight Review)

It's a beautiful Thanksgiving morning in New York City. Perfect day for a parade, and Fritz Malone just happens to have drifted up Central Park West to take a look at the floats. Across the crowd-filled street he sees a gunman on a low wall, taking aim with a shiny black Beretta. Seconds later, the air is filled with bullets and blood.

Mother Goose is fired upon, and seven bystanders are killed -- including two cops. Out for bagels, Fritz left home without his gun but quickly grabs a fallen officer's weapon and takes off after the gunman. A heroic act, but the PI ends up on the floor of a cruiser with a bag over his head.

Ushered into a secret meeting with the police commissioner, he soon finds himself caught up in a worst-case scenario: a terrorist calling himself "Nightmare" has been threatening this type of disaster, and the mayor and police commissioner disregarded the blackmail notes as an empty threat. Fritz Malone -- the bastard child of a former police commissioner -- is hired to catch this lunatic, and play his part in the cover-up.

It's apparent this situation must be resolved immediately (and quietly) when parts of the Deputy Mayor begin appearing at police headquarters. As he digs deeper into each lead, the PI's instincts tell him this "nightmare" is not what it seems. And City Hall be damned.

I pride myself on my ability to figure out the whodunit long before the last page, but Richard Hawke took the wind out of my sails early on. Just when I thought I knew all the answers, another lead and another person of interest waited in the next chapter. It took every ounce of my willpower to keep myself from flipping to the last chapter. Patience is supposedly a virtue, and this time it paid off.

As for the characters, I'd love to split a bottle of whiskey with Fritz and his associates in some dim, smoky dive. They each have a three-dimensional quality, and the dialogue between them is quick-witted and sarcastically funny without sounding contrived. Even as the characters are in the midst of a possibly deadly situation, there is a bit of dark humor lurking under the surface. When a gaggle of nuns are thrust into the murderer's plot, Fritz's friend has one of the best lines in the whole novel: First we catch him and beat the living shit out of him. Then we'll worry about the forgiveness part. Which sums up my feelings on the subject as well.

Hawke's breakneck pacing and sly, smooth writing places this new series at the top of my favorites list alongside Dennis Lehane and Robert Crais.

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Richard Hawke is a pseudonym for Tim Cockey, author of the Hitchcock Sewell novels.
Visit the author's website
Read the first chapter of Speak of the Devil

ISBN: 1400064252
Pub. Date: January 2006
Publisher: Random House, Incorporated