A+ #BookReview: Edge by Tracy Clark

Edge (Detective Harriet Foster, # 4) by Tracy Clark
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, suspense, thriller
Series: Detective Harriet Foster #4
Pages: 332
Published by Thomas & Mercer on December 2, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

When a tainted drug starts claiming lives across the city, Detective Harriet Foster and her team race to track down the source…before it takes one of their own.
Chicago’s finest are scouring the city for a tainted new opioid making the rounds, but they’re coming up empty. With five people already dead—a college kid, a new mother, and three poker players—all they really know is the drug’s Edge. Where it’s coming from is still anyone’s guess.
Detective Harriet Foster doesn’t have time for guessing games. She needs answers. And when the next overdose hits Homicide where it hurts most, Harri is determined to get what she wants. But keeping her eyes squarely on the prize proves harder than expected.
Still reeling from her last case (and the stain of suspicion it left on her career), Harri finds herself at a tipping point. The drug isn’t the only edge she needs to worry about. If she can’t come back from her own, there’s no telling whether this investigation will lead to a satisfying conclusion…or her own demise.

My Review:

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago Way!”

While the quote is from the 1987 movie, The Untouchables, based on a 1957 book of the same title ABOUT the FBI’s pursuit of the notorious gangster Al Capone in 1930, it also reads as if its ripped from the headlines – the fictional headlines about the case that has Detective Harriet Foster of the Chicago Police Department tied up in knots – and not just because one of the victims belongs to one of the CPD’s own.

This doesn’t start out as a homicide case at all. Harriet was taking a walk early in the morning on what should have been her day off. She never expected to find two bodies on the grass behind the closed gates of a park. From a distance, it looks like two dead teenagers. Close up, it looks like a couple of kids dead of either an overdose.

At least until Harriet’s cursory check for signs of life finds actual signs of life in one of them – and the race to save Ella Bryce is on. For the first but not the last time in this story. Because Bryce’s uncle is one of Harriet’s fellow detectives, and the man is not going to let this go even when he should back away.

As one of his colleagues quips later, “there’s a good reason surgeons don’t operate on their own family,” and that cops shouldn’t either.

If this were the simple case it originally appeared – two middle class college students experimenting with drugs that a friend of a friend said were ‘safe’ – and discovering the hard way that they’re not – this would not have been a homicide case and probably wouldn’t have been investigated much if at all. Whether or not it should have been is a different question well above Harriet’s paygrade.

But it’s not simple because those first two victims are not the only ones. There’s clearly a bad batch of something out on the streets, because people keep turning up dead from it – and drug suppliers don’t set out to kill their customers. After all, it’s bad for business.

The question is, whose business? The second question, the one that dogs the investigators’ minds and footsteps, is the question that no one wants to be asked but has to be asked anyway. Because Detective Matt Kelley’s niece, the girl whose life Harriet saved in that park, is clearly lying about pretty much everything pretty much all of the time.

And the results of that are not going to be pretty at all.

Escape Rating A+: I held off on putting together my Best Books list for this year because I expected Edge to be a contender for that list. I was NOT disappointed. This whole series, beginning with Hide, has been awesome and Detective Harriet Foster has been a fascinating character to follow. Not just because of her dogged investigative skills, but because we’ve been watching her tiptoe oh-so-slowly out of the shadows of her own life towards healing as the series has continued. With each entry in the series, she pushes both the case and herself forward and it’s utterly absorbing with every single one of her steps – including the ones that go backward.

The series is also fun – at least for this reader – because it is so very much Chicago in all of its messy glory AND its terrible weather. Hide took place in the early fall, Fall in the late fall, Echo in the bone-chilling cold of a typical (and typically awful) Chicago winter, while Edge takes place on the leading edge of what will eventually be spring. March in Chicago is still freezing, still snowy, still icy. Basically, March in Chicago is still mostly winter but with longer days in which to notice how dirty the snow piles that have been sitting around since January look.

The case that Harriet and the team uncover is one of those cases that peels back like an onion – including the tears. At first it makes no sense – and it’s not theirs. There’s not a pattern – more like a bunch of mismatched speckles. Two kids in that park. A young mother with postpartum depression. Three middle-aged meat-packers having a poker night. That’s the side the cops see.

It’s only when the body of a local mob boss is discovered in a back alley, shot to death in her own limo in what is obviously both a hit AND an inside job, that the cops realize this case is both bigger and stranger than it appeared – and that Detective Kelley’s niece is somehow still in the thick of it.

The Gamon crime family has always been untouchable (in a considerably less savory way than Eliot Ness and his famous FBI team) – but once they’ve put the touch on themselves their empire starts unraveling – and fast. And in that chaos and power vacuum, Harriet and her team find a way to save a girl who might not deserve it but they’re going to try to save anyway. If they can.

That the whole thing ties itself back to old rumrunners’ tunnels under Bronzeville that date back to Capone ties in that quote from the movie both nicely and messily at the same time. And made for one hell of an almost shootout to end this one with a really big – if slightly muffled – bang.

But still and all, what makes this book and this series work for this reader is the character of Harriet Foster herself, not just as a cop but as a woman trying to put herself back together after more tragedy than any one person should have to live with. But she does and its utterly absorbing to watch her work.

Harriet, her crew and her cases remind this reader of Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley in her series that began with The Jigsaw Man. Harriet herself also has a lot in common with PI Cass Raines, the leading character of the author’s earlier Chicago-set mystery series that begins with Broken Places. Raines herself makes an extended cameo appearance in Edge, managing to set Harriet’s police partner Vera on her own edge AND making the reader want to dive into her series to learn more about Raines because she’s every bit as dynamic and fascinating a character as Harriet is – but in her own, unique, way.

Harriet will probably, hopefully, be back next December with whatever one word title fits the case she gets caught up in next. I’m looking forward to getting caught up in it with her.

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