The Killing Zone
About this ebook
Gabe's girlfriend Jo is drowning. She stares up at him, eyes wide with terror, as he fights to grab her hand. In a moment, the frothing river swallows her up, and Jo is gone. Nine months have passed since Jo's death, and Detective Wager cannot get the image out of his mind. Rather than fight the urge to blame himself, he embraces the guilt, punishing himself for it every day. Only his work on the homicide squad can distract him, and he has just landed a case fraught with political implications. A crusading black city councilman is found murdered in an abandoned lot, and the city teeters on the edge of a riot. As Wager investigates the politician's secret past, he must balance his own pain with a burning need to see justice done.
About the author
Rex Burns (b. 1935) is the author of numerous thrillers set in and around Denver, Colorado. Born in California, he served in the Marine Corps and attended Stanford University and the University of Minnesota before becoming a writer. His Edgar award-winning first novel, The Alvarez Journal (1975), introduced Gabe Wager, a Denver police detective working in an organized crime unit. Burns continued this hard-boiled series through ten more novels, concluding it with 1997's The Leaning Land. One of the Wager mysteries, The Avenging Angel (1983), was adapted as a feature film, Messenger of Death, starring Charles Bronson. Burns's other series centers on Devlin Kirk, a Denver private detective whose specialty is industrial security. Introduced in Suicide Season (1989), Kirk appeared in two more novels. Once a monthly mystery review columnist in the Rocky Mountain News, Burns has also written nonfiction and hosted the Mystery Channel's Anatomy of a Mystery. He lives and writes in Boulder, Colorado.