Blood Count: An Artie Cohen Mystery

Set in December 2008, Nadelson’s ninth mystery featuring Russian émigré and NYPD detective Artie Cohen (after 2009’s Londongrad) shows her at the top of her game. Cohen is roused in the middle of the night by a call from a former girlfriend, journalist Lily Hanes, who asks for his help dealing with a dead neighbor, Marianna Simonova. Despite Hanes’s claim that Simonova died of natural causes in her Harlem apartment, Cohen suspects Hanes isn’t telling him everything. When his digging reveals that another elderly resident of Simonova’s building died unexpectedly about six months earlier, he wonders whether a desire to spare the seriously ill suffering was behind both deaths. Alternatively, the tenants may have been in the way of an ambitious developer’s plans to upgrade the building. Nadelson has few peers at incorporating a strong whodunit plot into a contemporary police inquiry, but her real strength is Cohen himself, a tortured but sympathetic soul whose close relationships are never straightforward. (Oct.)