While You Were Gone

This is the fifth novel in the Mercy Investigations Series: While Mercy Torcher is back in Boston, undercover to help her father, the Judge (see “Convictions”), Ed Steadman, Jack Nowan, and Reggie Jackson are left in San Francisco to deal with a rape and attempted murder by a sexual predator of a boy, the nephew of redhead Acton Barr, half Steady Ed’s age but attracted to him. Also a particularly nasty bail skip, and a vicious dust-up for Reggie with four white hockey players from SF State, who take issue with a young black man dating a white girl. Into the mix comes a group of would-be male boy predators who must be infiltrated to find out if anything connects. Along with all this, Mercy Investigations adopts a huge unfriendly cat they name Cal, by way of Jack clonking the monster over the head with a trashcan lid. The story begins with Mercy’s return from Boston in July of 1999, with Jack becoming Mercy’s Scheherezade in order to tell her what she missed.