Darker Angels

Howard Drew, an unrelenting LAPD homicide detective assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, investigates the murders of victims long dead. He prowls moral fault lines and assumes the perspectives of his victims and their killers. Drew waits, poised to listen when guilty people divulge information and tired people fold and betray their secrets. Drew also listens to the chorus of forgotten voices and speaks for them because the collective dead demand it.

In 2000, a friend discovered Anastasia Stepanchikov, a pretty 29-year-old prostitute from the Ukraine, beaten and shot to death inside her luxury Studio City apartment. Police speculated at the time that Russian organized crime may have been involved. Despite an exhaustive investigation by detectives of LAPD's Homicide Special Section, they never identified the killer or brought them to justice. The leads dried up, and the case went cold.

Twenty-one years later, Detective Howard Drew and...