Billionaire Orson Darcy’s fatal plunge from the eighth floor of his Fifth Avenue apartment building would have seemed suspicious even if it weren’t for the sign his killer left behind: “DDD&R, I AM COMING FOR YOU.” The “YOU” presumably includes Darcy’s partners, Peyton Danforth, Richmond Dingell III, and Butch Rapp, and Det. Bridget Washington, the newly promoted head of the NYPD’s Prime Cases Squad, will have her hands full keeping them safe. So it’s lucky that Frank Verity, a New York Examiner reporter fired after he was sued for libel by a crooked developer, is constantly being pushed forward by Sonny McHale, his best friend at the Examiner, who’d like nothing better than to cradle Frank in her arms. The intruder who defenestrated Darcy is soon identified to the reader, and not long thereafter to Frank, Sonny, and Bridget, as Jeffrey Hayder, whose scheme to secure his future by slipping illegal tips to the partners hit a snag when they framed him for insider trading and he was imprisoned. The many bite-sized flashbacks designed to provide information about the characters’ motivations mainly have the effect of sowing confusion, and the billionaires marked for extinction manage to be both corrupt and uninteresting. But even readers untroubled by the prospect that Ceci Darcy, the widow who’s suddenly been catapulted into a partnership, may be targeted may well root for Bridget, Sonny, and Frank, because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
