ANYTHING YOU SAY CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU

Combining Southern grace and urban brutality, ex-cop Drummond debuts with 10 short stories grouped into five blistering fictional portraits of Baton Rouge policewomen. Each lady is tough even without her bulletproof vest, and all are plagued by death and corruption as they undertake the bracing, dehumanizing enforcement of justice. In the three "Katherine" stories, the protagonist relates in her own dispassionate voice how she fired two shots into a robbery suspect's chest and then massaged his heart through the gaping bullet wound. She possesses a keen talent for detecting danger and the gruesome gift of determining cause and time of death—a few hours, a day, a week—from the first pungent whiffs of a corpse. In "Liz," a haunted traffic officer recuperates from a car accident, dredging up grisly memories from her days on the force; in "Mona," the burned-out protagonist struggles not to lose control in her professional and personal life. On her first day at work in Victim Services, another policewoman ("Cathy") responds to a stabbing, the knife still sticking out of the woman's chest when she arrives. Years later, after Cathy has married one of the investigators, the victim returns to ask her to reopen the case, accusing Cathy's husband of misconducting the investigation. And in "Sarah," the protagonist escapes to New Mexico from the moral morass she lands in when a group of policewomen take justice into their own hands in a Louisiana swamp. Choosing original characters over clichés and gritty detail over simplification, Drummond continually surprises with her profiles in courage, which focus on a captivating minority on the force. Agent, Jandy Nelson. 8-city author tour. (Feb. 6)

Forecast: Drummond, a former cop, works with the same source material as many thriller writers, but comes up with something quite different. Readers of literary fiction are the likely audience, but booksellers might have success offering this to adventurous fans of police procedurals and true crime.