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.

From the award-winning author of Hide and Fall comes a taut tale of renegade justice and long-awaited resolution, bringing the thrilling Detective Harriet Foster series to a heart-stopping conclusion.
Hardwicke House, home to Belverton College’s exclusive Minotaur Society, is no stranger to tragedy. And when a body turns up in the field next to the mansion, the scene looks chillingly familiar.
Chicago PD sends hard-nosed Detective Harriet “Harri” Foster to investigate. The victim is Brice Collier, a wealthy Belverton student, whose billionaire father, Sebastian, owns Hardwicke and ranks as a major school benefactor. Sebastian also has ties to the mansion’s notorious past, when thirty years ago, hazing led to a student’s death in the very same field.
Could the deaths be connected? With no suspects or leads, Harri and her partner, Detective Vera Li, will have to dig deep to find answers. No charges were ever filed in the first case, and this time, Harri’s determined the killer must pay. But still grieving her former partner’s death, Harri must also contend with a shadowy figure called the voice—and their dangerous game of cat and mouse could threaten everything.

My Review:

You can feel the deep cold of a Chicago winter wafting from the pages to chill your fingers to the bone as you read Echo. February is the cruelest month in the city, as it’s so cold you can see your breath, the pigeons huddle under the heat lamps at the ‘L’ stations, sunrise doesn’t happen until you get to work and sunset comes LONG before it’s time to go home. It feels like it’s been cold forever and that it’s going to be cold every bit as long – which it might, as winter holds onto the city with an icy grip that shows no signs of breaking.

Detective Harriet Foster of the Chicago Police Department has been breaking since we met her in the first book in this series, Hide. But she’s not quite broken – at least not yet – in spite of not letting herself find solace or even closure for the two hits that have left her reeling in badly suppressed agony; the senseless death of her son as he was playing in the front yard, and the staged suicide of her police partner.

Her son’s killers have been held to as much account as they ever will be, but the death of her partner is still an open case – or so Harri believes when this story opens. That hope is dashed when Internal Affairs closes the case, taking the evidence at a face value that Harri has called into question. Whoever killed Glynnis made it look like G. was a dirty cop, and IA would rather bury the case and Harri’s partner than open a can of worms that no one on the force wants to open. Justice be damned.

That G.’s killer has been calling Harri from a succession of burner phones to taunt her about the case and promise her that she’ll fall to his dirty tricks just as Glynnis did is just more black slush on top of the grey snow piled all over the city.

Just as Harri decides to pursue this very personal case very much on her own time and off the books – and her new partner, Vera Li is just as determined to join her in spite of the risks to both of their lives and careers – they get caught up in a very much on-the-books case that seems as far from Harri’s barely hanging on, hard-working, city employee life as it possible for it to get.

A young man has been found dead in a snow covered field on Chicago’s North Side, a stone’s throw away from the big house his ultra-wealthy father owns as a private ‘Animal House’ for the scions of the family as they attend the expensive private college nearby. A college where the family name is on half the buildings, and where once the father and now the son are rich and privileged legacy students – with all the power and indulgence that wealth can provide.

The only thing that hard-working CPD Detective Harriet Foster would normally have in common with a hard-partying rich boy skating through life on his father’s well-earned reputation would be that she’s the cop investigating his murder.

But it’s not.

Because it’s beginning to look a lot like Brice Collier wasn’t murdered for anything HE did – and not that he didn’t do plenty of things that no one dared to accuse him of. Just as Harri figures out that her partner’s murder – and it definitely was murder – had nothing to do with anything that G. might have EVER done.

Instead, the two cases ‘echo’ each other, as the sins of the fathers are being visited upon their children by perpetrators for whom revenge is a dish best served as cold as February in Chicago.

Escape Rating A+: This series has been awesome from the very first page of the very first book, Hide. The second book, Fall, managed to be even better. The blurb claims that this book is the conclusion to the trilogy, and I was so utterly bummed about that until I noticed that in spite of the blurb the series continues this time next year with Edge.

This story does conclude the initial story from Hide. In that first book, Harri was dealing, badly, with the death of her son and dealing equally badly with the death of her police partner and friend. Over the course of the series she has managed to both solve some really thorny – and very typically Chicago – murders while at the same time being very human and broken and not dealing with her own personal shit well at all.

And yet still putting one foot in front of the other.

The case here feels ripped from the headlines. The young scion of a rich and influential family, someone whose way has been repeatedly smoothed over by family money and power, who expects to skate through life and never face the consequences of his frequently scummy actions – is murdered. He could have been killed for some of his own misdeeds, but it goes deeper and darker than that as it’s clear from early in the case that his own actions hadn’t yet caught up with him. And that his death hasn’t had the effect that his murderers hoped for.

Meanwhile, Harri’s personal case goes down a parallel path. Her partner’s death wasn’t about anything G. did. It’s not even about anything Harri ever did. It’s all to get back at someone in the past who is just as unreachable as the Collier paterfamilias. Even though that unreachability is a parallel that shouldn’t have been part of the parallel.

The Collier case is riveting in the way that great police procedurals are riveting, as Harri and her team work through the evidence in spite of pressure from both the senior Collier and City Hall. They manage to work their way to a sticky and convoluted end through layers of facts and lies and long-buried secrets.

Harri’s personal case is compelling in the way that the best thrillers are compelling. She’s being taunted and threatened by someone who knows everything about her while she knows nothing about them or their motives. That case slowly unravels, bit by bit and step by step, even as Harri does an often poor job at keeping herself from unravelling along with it.

In the end, she emerges victorious, stronger in her broken places, and with friends at her back she hadn’t been willing to let in. Justice prevails for her, as the reader hopes that it will, even if the closest that the Collier case can reach is closure. But that’s right too.

I’m glad to see the trauma of Harri’s personal case get solved and resolved, and I’m equally glad that this is not the end of her story. She’s a dynamic, flawed and fascinating character and I can’t wait to ride along with her again next December in Edge.