Cruel Mercy: A Detective Sergeant McAvoy Novel

Sometimes a crime is so big that even a hulking Scotsman such as DS Aector McAvoy must stretch his detecting chops and leg it to America to solve a case. So it goes in Mark's riveting sixth installment (after Dead Pretty) of his (usually) UK-based crime series. This time around, McAvoy is in New York, on the hunt for wife Roisin's missing brother, Valentine Teague. Complicating matters is that Teague is an Irish traveler, a member of a group often pejoratively referred to as tinkers and gypsies. Add to this mess the corpse and almost-corpse (he's in a medically induced coma) of two other Irishmen—boxing coach Brishen Ayres and his star fighter Shay Helden—who were traveling with Teague in New York, and there's more than enough reason for McAvoy to cross the Atlantic to investigate. Teague and Helden have a history, both in and out of the ring, and now that they're in America, it's getting swept up into a larger story of the Italian mob, illegal fights, and even a hit man from Chechnya. (Mark is never one to shy away from expansive, even epic-sized, plots—but he always pulls it off.) Joining forces with NYPD Det. Ronald Alto, McAvoy has his work cut out for him.