Long Fall from Heaven

This pleasingly moody noir from Wier (Longnecks & Twisted Hearts) and Burton (These Mortal Remains) introduces a promising duo with C.C. "Cueball" Boland and Micah Lanscomb, owner and employee, respectively, of NiteWise Security in 1987 Galveston, Tex. After one of the company's guards is beaten to death at a warehouse owned by the "Old Island Money" DeMour family, the duo, not trusting headstrong investigating detective Lt. Leland Morgan, try to determine if more motivated the crime than simple robbery. Cueball suspects a recently paroled sociopath, Harrison Lynch, he encountered years before as a rookie Dallas cop. Flashbacks, meanwhile, trace the crime back to 1943, when a serial killer linked to the Manhattan Project arrived in the raucous port town. This brisk whodunit can't quite bear the weight of its large-scale themes, but readers should welcome future outings for the appealingly world-weary Boland and Lanscomb from Wier (Burton died in 2011). (May)