Target of Opportunity

Sensibly told crime fiction and the drama of OSS intelligence operations during World War II come together in this latest novel by Byrd ( California Thriller ). San Francisco Police Inspector Gilman (his first name is never mentioned) and his brother-in-law, former Washington attorney Donald Kerwin, stop by a 7-Eleven store and into a fusillade of bullets: a gunman at the cash register kills Kerwin and wounds Gilman. Gilman's sister-in-law Nina is not only distraught about her husband's death; she is outraged when an illegal police search leads to the dismissal of charges against the suspect. When the killer returns to his home city of Boston, Nina trails him, promising revenge, and Gilman follows to stop her. The trail leads to a professor whose vivid memories of helping the French Resistance 40 years before have an unexpected correlation with present-day circumstances. Byrd accurately describes the gritty realities of both police work and war-time events without using the tinny prose of second-rate hard-boiled writers. He's good at building suspense, too, but when Gilman learns the truth behind Kerwin's murder and is set up to prevent another, the final race to stop the gunman leads to predictable results. (September)