Last Night

The day before his graduation in Manhattan, Stuyvesant High School valedictorian Titus “Crisp” Crespo, who is of mixed race, encounters a racist cop in Brooklyn while bicycling home in Ellis’s contrived second crime novel featuring FBI agent Elsa Myers (after 2018’s A Map of the Dark). The cop orders Crisp to ride toward him, and then charges Crisp with riding a bike on the sidewalk. When Crisp objects, the officer cuffs him for resisting arrest. As a result, Crisp is behind bars when the commencement ceremony occurs. Upon his release, Crisp connects with a stereotypical bored affluent white teenager, Glynnie Dreyfus, and agrees to accompany her to Red Hook, where Crisp’s father, whom he never met, grew up, so that she can replenish her pot supply. Before long, both Crisp and Glynnie are reported missing and someone has been shot to death. Myers plays a limited role in the case, and the interwoven story line of Lex Cole, the NYPD detective assigned to find Crisp, fails to engage. Readers will hope that Ellis uses fewer coincidences to drive her plot next time. Agent: Dan Conaway, Writers House. (Feb.)