Beyond Ice, Beyond Death: A Nora Callum Mystery

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. (May)