THE DEEP DARK DESCENDING

Still grieving the wife who died four years ago, Detective Max Rupert (The Heavens May Fall, 2016, etc.) roars into action when evidence mounts that the hit-and-run that killed her was premeditated murder.

Boady Sanden, the attorney who ended his unlikely friendship with Max by trashing him on the witness stand, doesn’t want to make nice. He doesn’t even want to talk. He just wants to drop off a file he’s happened to come by that contains a voice recording of two men clearly planning Jenni Rupert’s death. Max doesn’t recognize either of the two voices. Apart from Detective Niki Vang, the partner he’s never truly opened up to, he has no allies in Minneapolis Homicide. And he’s already got his hands full with the bizarre case of an automotive fire that nearly killed Dennis Orton, the mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and would have killed his girlfriend, Pippi Stafford, if she hadn’t already been dead in the back seat. No matter. Max takes on uncooperative witnesses, international sex traffickers, knee-deep corruption in his own department, and everyone else who stands between him and the truth. A series of increasingly nerve-wracking flash-forwards show Max, burning for condign revenge yet reluctant to strike the fatal blow, confronting the man he’s become convinced ordered Jenni’s murder miles from everywhere on the middle of a frozen lake in subzero January temperatures. Has Max indeed found the guilty party? Will he kill him? And if he does, what kind of peace (and possible sequels) can he expect?

Eskens infuses the old this-time-it’s-personal trope with raw urgency, righteous indignation, and enough scorching action to melt every trace of the Minnesota snow in his finest hour to date.