cover image Cuts Through Bone

Cuts Through Bone

Alaric Hunt. Minotaur, $24.99 (320p) ISBN 978-1-250-01330-9

Hunt’s debut, winner of the PWA Best First Private Eye Novel competition, suffers rather than benefits from an unlikely pairing of investigators. For reasons that are unclear, veteran New York City gumshoe Clayton Guthrie has hired high school graduate Rachel Vasquez to assist him in his business. Her family reasonably asks, “Who hires a Puerto Rican girl fresh out of high school and gives her a pistol?” She gets her first big case three months in when the firm tries to exonerate Greg Olsen, who’s been arrested for the murder of Columbia University coed Camille Bowman. Bowman is the latest “eye-catchingly blond and beautiful” woman to be gunned down, and the police have found that Olsen owns a pistol that could be the murder weapon. Overblown prose (“dawn broke, like an egg yolk bleeding yellow into a dark pan”) doesn’t help an unremarkable plot. In 1988, Hunt received a life sentence, which he’s currently serving out in South Carolina. (May)