Early but well done Lt Harald story. Her NC judge is a good but limited character but the Lt keeps evolving. A good, "who done it" and why, storyline kept my interest throughout. ( )

While off-duty, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald intervenes in a street situation where a young woman seems to be in danger from the man she's with, and ends up in the hospital herself, with some fairly serious knife wounds. Meanwhile, her partner, Detective Tildon, reluctantly prepares to compete in a cribbage tournament at a swanky small hotel in Manhattan. When one of the cribbage boards turns out to hold a bomb, the investigation into who is responsible, and who was actually the intended target, takes many strange turns, some of them reaching fairly far back into the past. Good reading, as always with Maron. Sigrid loosens up just a skosh and realizes that a touch of femininity isn't necessarily fatal to her career. It did puzzle me throughout just exactly why Maron got her main character knifed in the first few pages; neither the crime she was preventing nor the injury itself seemed to serve any real purpose in the story, nor was it used to distract or mislead the amateur detective holding the book, if you take my meaning. *shrug* She so rarely does this to me that I'm going to give Maron a "get out of author jail free" card this time. ( )

Lieutenant Sigrid Harald is a NYPD detective whose partner, Detective Charles Tildon, alias Tillie, heads out to a cribbage tournament he'd rather not go to. At the tournament he is lined up to play a beautiful Navy Commander which puts him beside another duo one of which is a target to be killed by a bomb hidden in a cribbage board. The explosion kills its target and badly wounds Tillie and Sigrid gets the case.

The problem is to figure out who was the target and then look for suspects. However, there is no evidence that clearly indicates a target and Sigrid & the Navy officer assigned to the case because of the wounded Navy Commander follow many leads before they see a suspect they can zero in on. Before they reach that point, another innocent hotel employee is killed adding more mystery to the case.

This was an interesting mystery to figure out and Sigrid was and interesting protagonist. ( )

Synopsis: Tilly goes to a cribbage tournament and get nearly killed by a bomb planted at a near-by table. Was the intended victim the wealthy cribbage addict, the professor interested in radicals from the 1960s or was it the Navy officer with top secret information? Sigrid has to work hard to solve this case and misses Tilly's help while worrying if he will ever return to police work.
Review: Another tidy mystery and this one is extremely twisted. ( )