I’m getting worried about Maggie.
It seemed like a sneaky trick of fate that we had to investigate a murder at the Erie Street Cemetery this morning, the same place that brought us together almost eight months ago. Then, it had been the brutal murder of a teenage girl, the victim of a particularly vicious trafficker. Maggie worked on identifying the victim and I worked on taking care of the trafficker. I thought I’d covered all my tracks, but in all my extracurricular activities I hadn’t run across someone who could tweak as much information from trace evidence as Maggie Gardiner.
She found me. Of course it didn’t help that we work in the same building, her in the forensic lab, me in the homicide unit. By the end of that case, however, she could no longer expose me without exposing herself. And thus began the schizophrenic months of summer and fall, working together while constantly monitoring each other for threats. Would I kill again? Would her conscience get the better of us? Our truce stretched and strained day after day, but eventually it will break under the stress of cases like this, a young man tossed across a snowy grave with a single wound to his heart. On his body we found only a name tag reading ‘Evan’ and a blank key card with a logo, which Maggie identified as that of the local university. She guided me through the sprawling campus as an excuse to have a private chat.
Her husband, my fellow homicide detective Rick Gardiner, is still dogging my trail. What everyone else chalks up as simple jealousy–Maggie and I are supposedly dating, something she lets him think to distract him from my crimes–is turning into a concerted investigation of my past. He’s preparing to travel to Chicago, armed with my head shot, for some in-person interviews with my former coworkers. But they’re not going to recognize the guy in the picture as ‘Jack Renner,’ so, yeah, that’s a problem.
And then there’s this dead kid. He seems to have no past, no verifiable history, no trace of the money he’d been embezzling. His shady girlfriend masterfully evaded our questions and promptly disappeared…yet just as I thought she’d skipped for good, she popped back up– because, of course, I have something she wants. But she’s not going to get it until I get the truth.
Meanwhile, Rick is pulling his own disappearing act, and if he takes me down, the vortex will pull Maggie down with me. I can’t let that happen.
I have to leave.
The problem is, I don’t want to.
Every Kind of Wicked is the sixth book in the “Gardiner and Renner” thriller series, released August 25, 2020.
In this mesmerizing new novel from bestselling author Lisa Black, the discovery of a young man’s corpse leads forensics expert Maggie Gardiner and Cleveland detective Jack Renner into a dark and dangerous web of lies . . .
Life and death have brought Maggie Gardiner full circle, back to the Erie Street Cemetery where she first entered Jack Renner’s orbit. Eight months ago, she learned what Jack would do in the name of justice. More unsettling still, she discovered how far she would go to cover his tracks. Now a young man sprawls atop a snowy grave, his heart shredded by a single wound. A key card in the victim’s wallet leads to the local university’s student housing—and to a grieving girlfriend with an unsettling agenda.
Maggie’s struggle to appease her conscience is complicated by her ex-husband, Rick, who’s convinced that Jack is connected to a series of vigilante killings. Also a homicide detective, Rick investigates what seems like a routine overdose on Cleveland’s West Side; but here, too, the appearance belies a deeper truth.
Rick’s case and Jack’s merge onto the trail of a shadowy, pill-pushing physician who is everywhere and nowhere at once, while Maggie and Jack uncover a massive financial shakedown hiding in plain sight. And when Rick’s bloody fingerprint is found at another murder scene, Maggie’s world comes undone in a violent, irreversible torrent of events . . .
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About the author
Lisa Black is the New York Times bestselling author of 14 suspense novels, including works that have been translated into six languages, optioned for film, and shortlisted for the inaugural Sue Grafton Memorial Award. She is also a certified Crime Scene Analyst and certified Latent Print Examiner, beginning her forensics career at the Coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and then the police department in Cape Coral, Florida. She has spoken to readers and writers at numerous conferences and is one of two Guests of Honor at 2020 Killer Nashville. Visit her website at lisa-black.com.
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