Sinister

Chicago, 1984. A butcher is gutting the women of Englewood and posing their bodies in the cold. Homicide detective Jimmy Parisi and his partner, Doc Gibron, have nothing but a nickname and a rising body count — and the clock is bleeding out.
The winter of 1984 turns lethal on Chicago’s South Side. In the gutted three-flats of Englewood, someone is luring the neighborhood’s most vulnerable women to filthy, freezing rooms and butchering them — a predator with a blade, a ritual, and no fear of the cold. Homicide detectives Jimmy Parisi and Doc Gibron catch the case, working payphones, stakeouts, and a city that would rather not notice who’s dying. As the killings escalate and the pattern sharpens toward a quiet stock-clerk named Albert Cranley, Parisi — a widower and single father — races a monster who has already learned to gaze back. Sinister is a hard-boiled procedural in the classic Parisi vein: bleak, propulsive, and unflinching about the price of the hunt.

Thomas Laird is the author of the Detective Jimmy Parisi Chicago crime series. His fiction has received favorable reviews from the Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Independent on Sunday, and Crime Time. His recent Jimmy Parisi novels include Coldest Case and Malignant.