Inside Man

McMahon’s disappointing second outing for the FBI’s oddball Patterns and Recognition Unit (after Head Cases) fails to recapture the magic of its predecessor. PAR head Gardner Camden and his partner, Joanne Harris, are on the way to the Florida home of informant Freddie Pecos, who’s supposed to be aiding the FBI’s investigation of militia group leader and weapons stockpiler J.P. Sandoval. In recent days, however, Pecos has gone silent. When Camden and Harris arrive, they find him dead from a gunshot. The obvious explanation that Pecos was outed as a rat is complicated by the weapons and $1 million in cash left behind, which Camden and Harris take to mean that whoever killed him was uninvolved in Sandoval’s operations. After the agents evade an ambush by Sandoval’s men, they return to the PAR offices, where subsequent sleuthing pins Pecos’s murder on a key suspect in what appears to be an unrelated string of north Florida missing persons cases. As the pieces click into place, McMahon falls victim to genre clichés—including a few instances of sloppy policing from his supposedly competent leads—that he managed to skirt or subvert in the previous novel. The result is a ho-hum mystery that fails to distinguish itself from the pack. (Jan.)