Billy McGrath spends much of his day in an office surrounded by custom made pine cabinets, each holding shelves of two-inch plastic binders called murder books. There is one for every homicide investigation in the precinct, and they define the structure of McGrath's life.

He is a homicide detective who now questions the value of the work he used to love. He is a man who grieves over the loss of his family, still in love with his ex-wife even as he blames himself for destroying her trust in him. He is a father who loves his daughter, yet doubts his ability to be a good parent. Billy McGrath is a man full of despair.

McGrath is also an honest, dedicated cop on the verge of making a big mistake. A middle-aged woman is murdered; found dead on the kitchen floor of her own home. It turns in to something more than a routine homicide investigation as soon as the cops realize the dead woman's son is Ricky Lee Richards, a big time dope dealer with powerful connections. Ricky Lee has his own ideas of justice, and he offers McGrath $500,000 to give him the name of the killer.

McGrath ignores the offer, but the case takes a hold on him. Even though his new job as head of a homicide unit usually means supervising other detectives, he decides to investigate the case, unable to explain the reasons even to himself. And he can't stop thinking about how much that money would help the two people he loves most in the world – and how wonderful it would be to be able to give them that kind of security as a way of making up for past failures.

There are a fair number of threads and sub-plots that gradually come together. Some of the coincidences strained credibility, but what makes Murder Book interesting is the intense exploration of the darker side of human nature. This is darker than my preferred reading; it's painful to see McGrath slipping into a morass where one wrong decision puts him on an irrevocable course with disaster. It is only when things look most dark that he begins to see a chance of redemption and hope.

--Jeri Wright