Blue Avenue

Noir fiction doesn’t get much darker than Wiley’s thriller introducing police detective Daniel Turner, who is largely an observer in his first outing. Disreputable Jacksonville, Fla., businessman William “BB” Byrd and his casually brutal cohort, Charles, pursue a serial killer who has just murdered Belinda Mabry, the woman who was BB’s first lover 25 years earlier. Even if it means further alienating his own precariously balanced family, BB can’t stop interrogating Jacksonville’s sleaziest pimps, prostitutes, and politicians to find out what happened to Belinda in life and death. Unpleasant secrets keep surfacing, sometimes in the investigation but also in the investigators, and Wiley (A Bad Night’s Sleep) is extremely good at creating an atmosphere of menacing dread as BB learns more about the dead woman and himself. New shocks occur all the way to the last page—and continue as readers reflect on what they’ve just witnessed. [em]Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency. (Dec.) [/em]