Let the Devil Sleep (Dave Gurney, No. 3)

Starred review from May 7, 2012
Verdon, who rejuvenated the impossible crime in his 2010 debut, Think of a Number, shows there’s much more that can be done with the serial killer plot in his breakneck, knockout third Dave Gurney whodunit (after 2011’s Shut Your Eyes Tight). Retired detective Gurney, dubbed “the NYPD Supercop” by the media for his phenomenal homicide clearance rate, once again can’t resist the opportunity to match wits with a brilliant murderer—in this case, the self-named “the Good Shepherd,” the subject of a reality TV project that a journalist asks his help on. Never identified, the Good Shepherd struck six times in the Syracuse area a decade earlier, targeting drivers of black Mercedes as part of his crusade against the wealthy. Gurney takes an iconoclastic approach to the cold case while tackling other, possibly unrelated investigations. The tension is palpable on virtually every page of a story that perfectly balances the protagonist’s complex inner life with an elaborately constructed puzzle. Agent: Molly Friedrich, the Friedrich Agency.

July 1, 2012
Still recuperating from the physical and psychic wounds he suffered in closing his last case (Shut Your Eyes Tight, 2011, etc.), retired NYPD Detective Dave Gurney is drawn into yet another one, a 10-year-old serial killing that's never been closed. As a favor to Connie Clarke, the freelance reporter who made him famous as the Supercop, Gurney agrees to give her daughter, journalism student Kim Corazon, a little help on a project that's suddenly mushroomed from an academic thesis to a series on RAM TV. To flesh out her sense of how murder devastates a lot more people than the murder victims, Kim has interviewed the widows and children of victims of the Good Shepherd, who fired on half a dozen drivers in black Mercedes sedans in upstate New York and Massachusetts, left little toy animals at each crime scene, and sent the cops a diatribe against the greedy rich that yielded a very clear psychological profile but proved no help in closing the case a decade ago. Initially agreeing to accompany Kim on her rounds for a single day, Dave predictably gets sucked into deeper involvement with the grieving relatives, some of them happier than others to air their grief; the scalawag front-office types at RAM TV; Kim's accusatory ex-boyfriend Robert Montague, ne Meese; and the law officials who neither solved the case nor want to talk about it now. Of the latter, New York State Police Senior Investigator Jack Hardwick is the most rational and helpful; his colleague Max Clinter, maddened by PTSD after he let the Shepherd escape his last crime scene, the craziest; and FBI agent Matthew Trout the most closemouthed and menacing. Endless allusions to Dave's brilliance can't obscure the fact that the colorless killer's plot is based on a cliche so well-established in the genre that experienced readers, spotting it long before the tortured genius, will feel pretty doggoned clever themselves.

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February 15, 2012

Medal-heavy NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney leaves the force for some peace and calm upstate, but no such luck. His basement is booby-trapped, and a super-sharp arrow lands in his yard. Soon he's rethinking the case of the "Good Shepherd," a mad-as-hell-at-society type who wreaked havoc a decade ago and disappeared. No one but Gurney believes that he's back. Verdon's Think of a Number was a best seller worldwide, so don't back off from this one.

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