Amazon.com (ISBN 0345386302, Mass Market Paperback)

Simon Winter was once one of the best cops on the Miami homicide beat, but now he's just another retired guy with no relatives. He sticks his trusty gun in his mouth--and just as he's about to squeeze the trigger, his neighbor Sophie Millstein pounds on his door.

Sophie, a Holocaust survivor, says she's just caught sight of Der Schattenmann (the Shadow Man), who hunted down the Jews of Berlin. He was a "catcher," a Jewish man who worked for the Gestapo. Once you glimpsed the Shadow Man, nobody ever saw you again. But Sophie just saw him, she's sure of it, right here in Miami!

Simon doubts it, but when Sophie is murdered, he doesn't believe that Leroy "Hightops" Jefferson, the crack addict seen sprinting out of her apartment with her jewelry, did the deed. Why was Sophie's cat strangled? And when another Holocaust survivor dies, why does his suicide note omit one letter of his wife's name? Did he write it at gunpoint? Simon and young sleuths Walter Robinson and Espy Martinez hunt the Shadow Man, and even Leroy winds up showing a streak of heroism.

Besides a clever premise, Katzenbach--a Miami Herald veteran--packs a lot of vivid local color into his Edgar-nominated mystery about a town where drug killings are so common the cops call them "felony littering." But the characters are simplistic and the narrative pace sluggish by comparison with Katzenbach's World War II POW murder mystery, Hart's War. --Tim Appelo