The Hanging Club

In Parsons’s solid third novel featuring London Det. Constable Max Wolfe (after 2015’s The Slaughter Men), Wolfe and his Murder Investigation Team view a video of a group of masked individuals abducting and hanging Mahmud Irani, a taxi driver whom they discover was once convicted of molesting underage girls. For Wolfe, a single father to five-year-old Scout, it’s difficult to drum up sympathy for those the Hanging Club, as they come to be known, target—a man who ran down a small child, a preacher who spews hate speech—but Wolfe’s determined to remind the public that the law must apply to everyone. Complicating his life is the sudden reappearance of childhood friend Jackson Rose, whom he and Scout discover one night sleeping rough on the city streets. Rose is as charming as Wolfe remembers, but his oldest friend can also be dangerous. Parsons does decent work mixing the messy particulars of Wolfe’s personal life with a case that demonstrates that the good guys and the bad guys are not always such distinct entities. [em]Agent: Sloan Harris, ICM. (Nov.) [/em]