Helpful Score: 2
Filomena Buscarsela (second in series) mystery featuring the Ecuadoran-born NYC cop. Well, she was a cop. Now she's an ex-cop trying to raise a toddler in a series of going-nowhere jobs. Currently working as a secretary for a nonprofit organization that does fundraising for environmental projects, she's also using her evenings looking into the death of a neighborhood grocery store owner who was also her friend and whose death seems to be ignored by the police. Is there a connection to the Dominican mob? If so, Fil could be in big danger. I really like Filomena. She's a smart, ethnic woman with a feminist bent who's made some mistakes in her life and is now trying to stay on the straight and narrow path. She's got attitude, she tells it like it is and she certainly manages to take all the glamour out of single-handedly raising a toddler while still capturing the beauty and importance of it, too. There are a few more in this series and I will be looking for them all.
Former New York City cop, now unemployed single mom Filomena Buscarsela, born in Ecuador but now living in N.Y.C., agrees to find the killer of a neighborhood grocer when it looks like the cops have given up because the Santo Domingo mob may be involved. As Fil begins asking around, she finds that people are afraid to talk because they fear a local voodoo priestess's wrath. Meanwhile, Fil is hired as a manager by an environmental activist organization, only to discover how mismanaged it is. The need to juggle her two-year-old daughter and new job slows down her investigation into the grocer's killing, despite help from a rookie cop. Taking the rookie under her wing, Fil schools the black woman in how to shave the edges of the law. At work, she realizes that the activists are laundering money for her old adversary, tycoon Samuel Morse. Now with two wrongs to right, Fil divides her time between the murder investigation and bringing Morse to justice.
