The “Butcher” is leaving dis­mem­bered corpses of women all over New York City and he seems to want to get Frank Quinn’s goat. Quinn is a former police captain, who’s been called back from retirement along with two of his former team members, Pearl, his ex-girlfriend, and the slovenly Fedderman. The “Butcher” is brilliant and the body count is climbing.

While the book is properly sus­pense­ful, I couldn’t suspend my disbelief at the notion that the NYPD would have little more than Quinn’s tiny team working on such a major case. Of the main characters, I found Pearl the most in­ter­est­ing: prickly and human. Quinn is something of a superhuman cypher, except where his teenaged daughter is concerned. And the Butcher was too good (bad?) to be true.