Ruthless and charismatic crime lord Manuel Perrine is dead and former detective Michael Bennett can bring his family out of the witness protection into which he, his 10 adopted children, their nanny and his grandfather have been forced.
Back in New York he is looking forward to returning to the homicide division but, thanks to remembered grudges he finds the top brass have put him in charge of the “Outreach Squad”, a collection of police misfits in Harlem who have developed bureaucracy into a fine art and inertia into a science.
It takes a report of a woman’s charred body found in an abandoned building – dismissed at first as the imagination of a vagrant on a substance high – to launch an investigation into a world of unimaginable depravity among the rich and famous.
As more and more reports come in of young women being invited by a wealthy clique as guests of honour at a series of long pig barbecues, Bennett is recalled to homicide to head up a task force trying to get to the bottom of what is fast becoming a city-wide problem.
To make matters worse, his live-in nanny-cum-love-interest is called home to Ireland to look after her dying mother, a man purporting to be the father of his youngest adopted daughter appears in the scene to take her away from him and he retains control of the Harlem misfits.
Patterson and Michael Ledwidge write well together. Burn proves it once again.
