This is the third in the David Mapstone series. These are more hard-boiled than I generally prefer, but I really enjoy the Phoenix setting and especially the area history. Mapstone's constant comments on the ever-present building of suburbs, paving over agricultural land, and old neighborhoods going to rot are getting just a little tedious; I expect if I were reading these spaced farther apart I wouldn't notice it so much. Out of the three I've read this was my least favorite in terms of the murders to be solved. Two plots going on: one involving a Russian super-villain after Mapstone's computer genius wife, and the other involving a dead homeless man found with the badge of an FBI agent, whose unsolved death happened 50 years before. For the first, I can't buy into the idea that arresting this one guy will make the threat to Lindsey vanish (and I also found unbelievable his ultimate fate). The car chase was great though. The FBI agent plot was somewhat unsatisfying to me. I did not understand why this case was so disturbing to the present-day FBI that they would interfere as they did. Mapstone does lots of meandering around to absolutely no effect, confesses he got nowhere, but solves it in the last two pages by pure chance. Eh, maybe life happens that way sometimes. But Talton did not tell us why Chief Peralta cared so much about the whole thing until the very last page; I would have liked some small clues during the book. I will still read more if I can get them from the library, I really do like the Phoenix history lessons.

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