Beyond Ice, Beyond Death
A Nora Callum Mystery
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Chicago homicide detective Nora Callum is, by her own description, cranky, moralistic, self-conscious, and a devoted single mother. She is also a very good cop, whose peg leg - the result of injuries sustained during a shoot-out - only adds to her determination to be first at any crime scene, and the most dogged member of her squad.
Nora's investigative talents are sorely tested when a body found frozen in the ice and snow of a typically pitiless Chicago winter turns out to be that of Edward Boyes, a NASA scientist. The only identifying elements on the corpse are a watch and a signet ring, which make cryptic references to "The Golden Swan" and Phobos I."
Phobos is a space probe, a joint undertaking of the Russian and American governments. But something's gone drastically off-track: why else would Boyes be murdered, and his Russian lover confined to a prison cell? As Nora looks into Boyes's background, she is struck by the intensity of the lovers' devotion, as evidenced in letters and videotapes; it is in direct proportion to the loneliness of her own life.
Supported by her partner, Art Campbell, her daughter, Meg, and her good friend Paris Viveka, a call girl trying to go straight, Nora confronts the crisis of her career when the accidental shooting of a suspected drug kingpin leads to her suspension from the force, and she must continue the investigation into the death of Edward Boyes on her own.
This deeply involving novel is an excellent addition to a series the Chicago Sun Times called "exceptionally promising."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As he did in A Wide and Capable Revenge, McCall gives a Russian twist to the case pursued by Chicago homicide detective Nora Callum in her second adventure. Nora is able to identify the body of a gunshot victim with the help of Valery Kuzov, a visiting professor who once worked on a failed Russian-U.S. space probe. Dead is Edward Boyes, an American who worked on the same project. A week before he was killed, Boyes publicly denounced the Russians for imprisoning his lover, flight controller Irina Varonyev, for her role in the loss of a spaceship in that project. The police close the case when a street punk confesses to the murder, but Nora is convinced of the space-probe link: two of Boyes's colleagues from NASA are, conveniently, in the area. Her hunt is complicated when the murder of a friend's beau prompts her to play one-woman posse-gunning down the unarmed perp lands her in a thicket of trouble. McCall, an orthopedic surgeon, depicts Nora, a single mother who lost a leg in a drug bust and walks with a prosthesis, as a disturbing blend of hostility and sentimentality. She is stalwart and bright but difficult to like.
