Blood Betrayal

Khan’s second in the Detective Inaya Rahman series (following Blackwater Falls) finds Det. Rahman continuing her work in the Denver Police Department’s Community Response Unit when separate police shootings take the lives of two young men—one Black, one Hispanic—on the same night. One involves a Blackwater Falls sheriff’s deputy who mistakes a can of spray paint for a gun during a late-night chase; the other, a Denver police officer who fired on an unarmed man fleeing a drug raid. Both shootings raise ghosts of the past for Rahman and her team, the first from a recent case involving the allegedly corrupt Blackwater Falls and the second rekindling the trauma of Rahman’s history with the Chicago police and a possible connection with her father’s refusal to discuss his past in Afghanistan. Despite a timely plot and likable, complex characters, the novel’s disregard for appropriate police procedures, jurisdiction issues, and the workings of police agencies gets in the way of the story.