Amazon.com Review
In this tight, suspenseful tale of a race against the clock to get a confession out of the chief suspect in the death of young Cathy Lake, every cop has his own private burden, his own reason for wanting to crack Albert Jay Smalls wide open and confirm him as the killer. Jack Pierce has the memory of his own murdered daughter and the promise he made to Cathy's mother. Norman Cohen has the vision of the terrible things he saw at the liberation of a concentration camp, the certain knowledge of the presence of evil in the world. Thomas Burke, the chief of police, has a dying son who's been dead to him for a long time.
Cook weaves the tragedies of all their lives almost seamlessly into the last 12 hours of their interrogation of the suspect; when it's over, if there's no confession, they must let Smalls go. This suspenseful thriller showcases Cook's skill at interpreting the psychological complexities of his well-drawn characters and his ability to turn an otherwise ordinary police procedural into a tense, haunting, and resonant novel. --Jane Adams
From Publishers Weekly
Did Albert Jay Smalls strangle eight-year-old Cathy Lake to death on a rainy afternoon in 1952? Two police detectives have 11 hours to find out before Smalls is released. The Edgar-winning Cook makes the most of that brief period of time, not only braiding the intricate elements of the crime but laying open the secretive, troubled lives of at least half a dozen characters. The case against Smalls is thin no witnesses, no physical evidence. A homeless vagrant who lived in a tunnel not far from where Cathy's body was found, he's been in custody for more than a week. No one has been able to crack his denial of the murder, but detectives Jack Pierce and Norman Cohen sense he's hiding something. Employing flashbacks and parallel action while in the interrogation frame, Cook adroitly weaves back and forth between the crime itself, the subsequent investigation and the halting questioning of the suspect. More compelling, however, is his portrayal of how the crime affects Pierce and Cohen, as well as several secondary characters. Pierce, for example, is a man driven by rage: his own daughter was murdered six years earlier and her case went unsolved. Cohen, who conducts most of the questioning while Pierce plows into Smalls's past, is still numb from what he saw in Germany as a soldier. Down to the cleverly hatched, melancholy ending, Cook (The Chatham School Affair; Places in the Dark) again takes readers down a dark, treacherous road into the heart of human fallibility and struggle.
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