Cruel Mercy

Mark’s absorbing sixth novel featuring Det. Sgt. Aector McAvoy (after 2016’s Dead Pretty) takes McAvoy from Yorkshire to upstate New York, to help Det. Ronald Alto of the NYPD solve an attack that put revered boxing coach Brishen Ayres in a coma and left Shay Heldon, Ayres’s brash young protégé, dead, with a mysterious second young man impaled on a nearby tree branch. McAvoy’s task is to track down his troublemaker brother-in-law, Valentine Teague, another boxer and a bitter rival of Heldon’s, missing since the ambush. As McAvoy and Alto try to uncover how Ayres and Heldon ended up victims of what soon appears to be a scrambled professional hit, their investigation slides into New York City’s world of organized crime: deals made, deaths dealt, power upheld. In the final stretch, the narrative skids between a well-wrought examination of the brutal pragmatism of mob dealings and a macabre vignette of religious fanaticism, bundling an unwieldy thicket of side plots into a satisfyingly melodramatic, if implausible, ending twist. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (Feb.)