SOMETIMES AT NIGHT

Back in Flatbush after his stint in the witness protection program in New Mexico, Marshall Grade gets handed a case in the worst possible way.

Like Marshall, Ray Vialoux is no longer one of the NYPD’s finest. With the encouragement of drug trafficker D’Anton Lewis, he’s run up a $67,000 gambling debt to Frank Cifaretti, who runs book out of his Brighton Beach bagel shop and who’s just sent Ray a pointed message: “MONEY BY TUESDAY, NO COPS.” Is there anything Marshall can do to help? Ray asks over a diner lunch that’s cut short when Ray’s killed by a shotgun blast that pierces the establishment’s window. Now that it’s too late to help his old friend, Marshall at least wants to avenge him. But every conversation that follows is awkward. Detective Floyd Nevins, who’s retiring the day the debt was due, keeps Marshall at arm’s length, and Deputy Inspector Loretta Flynn treats him like a low-grade fever. Hannah Vialoux is understandably ambivalent about discussing her husband’s murder with her ex-lover, and her teenage daughter, Ella, looks through him as if he weren’t there. Lewis threatens to gut Marshall with a knife he displays, and Cifaretti, when Marshall finally catches up with him, quite reasonably asks why he’d cancel a debt by killing the debtor. Could the motive for Ray’s execution lie in his investigation of the death of Jennifer Boyne, whose sudden, unmotivated suicide has left her parents devastated? To get to the bottom of the mystery, Marshall must slog awkwardly through a thicket of felonies, one perp at a time.

His return to his home turf makes this the least distinctive of the appealing hero’s three cases to date.