Flame Out

Cooley’s solid second police procedural featuring former FBI special agent June Lyons (after 2014’s Ice Shear) finds June, now a cop in her hometown of Hopewell Falls, N.Y., not quite over the death of her husband, Kevin, three years earlier—and facing a welter of crimes involving the volatile Ukrainian-American family of her police partner, Dave Batko. Soon after June saves a woman from a burning abandoned clothing factory, a mummified body is found in a sealed barrel walled up in the factory’s basement. The two cases intertwine in a complex and not always convincing plot that twists its lengthy way through sibling rivalries and other tensions, such as June’s vacillation over rejoining the Bureau, and her problematic relationship with her aging hippie mother. Though a little heavy-handed with June’s emotional flare-ups, Cooley does well by Ukrainian culture and cuisine, while assuring readers that today’s women cops and perps can both be tougher than their male counterparts. [em]Agent: Lisa Gallagher, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (May) [/em]