Crooked Numbers

O’Mara never hits a wrong note in his suspenseful sequel to 2012’s Sacrifice Fly, which introduced Raymond Donne, a former NYPD detective who now works as a middle-school dean in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After graduation, one of Donne’s students, Douglas Lee, got a scholarship to a private school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A year-and-a-half later, just short of his 17th birthday, Dougie dies at the tennis courts under the Williamsburg Bridge, the victim of multiple stab wounds. Donne attends the funeral home wake, where Dougie’s mother beseeches him to do what he can to pressure the police to dig deeper into her son’s murder. With the cooperation of newspaper reporter Allison Rogers, Donne does just that, at the risk of stepping on the toes of his former colleagues on the force. He quickly concludes that the simple explanation for the killing—that Dougie had fallen from grace and that his murder was gang- and drug-related—doesn’t add up. More suspicious violence reinforces the feeling. The plot is intricate without being elaborate, and the likable lead makes a plausible investigator. Agents: Erin Niumata and Maura Teitelbaum, Folio Literary Management. (Oct.)