The Numbers

Set three years before the events of 2008’s Unforeseen, Pirog’s rollicking sixth outing for Thomas Prescott (after 2021’s Jungle Up) takes 30-year-old Prescott, recently fired from the Seattle PD, to Philadelphia, where his college-age sister, Lacy, is burning up the water on Drexel University’s swim team, and the local police are stretched thin with anti-corporation protestors. Prescott confirms the death of one protestor, Brooke Wexley, a super-wealthy financier’s daughter found strangled inside her tent at a protest site. Soon afterward, the short-handed police captain of Philadelphia’s Ninth District asks Prescott to sign on as a consultant to catch a serial killer who’s murdered three people in the past two weeks, engraving a different set of three numbers on each victim’s forehead. Prescott’s intuition and instinct serve him well in his investigation of Brooke’s murder and the other killings, which involve a Mafia-run numbers racket. Prescott’s panache holds up through frat-house hijinks, police distrust, a demented hacker ex-girlfriend, and even Lacy’s MS diagnosis as the action builds to a shocking climax that turns everything he’s learned inside out. This fanciful, funny caper, the perfect starting point for newcomers, cries out for a TV adaptation. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International. (Feb.)