Helpful Score: 2
This sizzling tale is set deep in a Chicago winter. Wessel's hero, Harding, was once a licensed private investigator with an office, a partner, and a future, but then a simple little domestic case - find the family's missing daughter - turned on him when the daughter showed him the scars her father gave her. Harding promised to protect her, but he couldn't, not even after killing the man her father sent after them. Now Harding's an ex-con, working off the books on another simple little domestic case - take a few pictures of a straying husband and his girlfriend - but this case turns on him too. When the heartsick wife turns up at his door and the girlfriend turns up dead, Harding knows he's in trouble. But not until the cops tell him that he's a murder suspect and that his ex-lover's on a slab at the morgue does he realize just how much trouble is headed his way. Harding's trouble comes from all directions - from his terrifying past and his perilous present - and dead is just about the nicest thing that could happen to him.
