Blackout

May 1, 2018
PI Pete Fernandez has a well-deserved reputation as a screwup, mostly gained during his alcoholic years. Now he's several years sober with some success behind him, but there are still mobsters in New York and gang members in his hometown of Miami who want him dead. When he's hired to find the son of an aspiring Florida politician, Pete finds himself also looking at the unsolved murder of Patty Morales, a high-school classmate who disappeared in 1998 and whose remains he found in 2013 in her father's yard. And it's all somehow connected to the cultish La Iglesia de la Luz, once a flourishing church that has dwindled to a scant number of followers. Working with his partner and onetime lover, Kathy Bentley, Pete follows leads from New York to Miami to Key West, as the body count grows and danger increases. With its smart dialogue and vivid settings, this series concentrates equally on the trajectory of Pete Fernandez's life and the mysteries he tries to solve. From both perspectives, it's fine crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

March 19, 2018
Early in Segura’s convoluted fourth mystery featuring recovering alcoholic Pete Fernandez (after 2017’s Dangerous Ends), Ellen McRyan walks into Fernandez Investigations, located in a Spring Valley, N.Y., strip mall. Ellen is the wife of ambitious, charismatic Florida state senator Trevor McRyan, who’s running for governor, and they want to hire Pete to find their errant son, Stephan. Pete is shocked to recognize the man in the photo she shows him. In 1998, Patty Morales, a Miami, Fla., high school senior on whom Pete had a crush, went missing; 15 years later, the person in the photo, who he knew as Kenny Sampson, offered the police a lead in the case before disappearing. At first, Pete refuses to help the McRyans, but in the end he reluctantly returns to his hometown, where he reconnects with his former PI partner, Kathy Bentley. Pete and Kathy’s search for Stephan/Kenny turns into a hunt for Patty’s killer. A story this bleak needs a really distinctive character to carry it, but unfortunately Pete doesn’t measure up. Agent: Dara Hyde, Hill Nadel Literary Agency.