August 17, 2015
This well-crafted series launch from Smith (Forget Harry) introduces Claire Codella, a New York City detective back on the job after battling lymphoma for several months. Codella, who may look well but is still adjusting to her harrowingly close encounter with death, welcomes the distraction of a bizarre murder case. Someone posed the body of Hector Sanchez, the popular principal of PS 777, a public elementary school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, on his apartment floor to resemble Christ on the cross. With little evidence and plenty of suspects—including certain PS 777 parents, teachers, and fellow administrators—the detective and her team find that every clue brings new revelations about the public and private life of the man touted as the savior of PS 777, which was a failing school until he took over. Codella’s ruminations on death and dying are thought-provoking and never maudlin, providing readers with an insightful glimpse into the emotions and consequences of being a cancer survivor. Agent: Kathy Green, Kathryn Green Literary Agency.
Starred review from September 1, 2015
On her first day back from a long medical leave, NYPD Detective Claire Codella gets a homicide case. Hector Sanchez, new principal at P.S. 777, is found dead in his apartment, stripped to his boxers with his body arranged as if crucified, an apparent allusion to a magazine article calling him the savior of his struggling school. Both Codella and her assigned secondary, Detective Eduardo Munoz, need to show they're up to the job: she's just come through painful, debilitating chemo treatments for an aggressive form of cancer, while he's been outed as gay by bullying colleagues after his transfer from narcotics. As they become involved in public-school bureaucracy, they find that Sanchez was a striving micromanager who was hated by his legacy teachers but loved by his students' parents. He was also a vocal opponent of a proposed multimillion-dollar school technology program. This first of a proposed series reads like the work of a veteran crime-fiction writer. Smith's debut in the genre features snappy prose, a skillfully constructed plot, and a nicely detailed rendering of police work, all the while revealing just enough of Codella's backstory, including her personal relationship with a fellow detective, to make us want to know more. Fans of procedurals should add Smith to their must-read lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)