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ELEANOR TAYLOR BLAND

After the death of her husband, Chicago homicide detective Marti MacAlister moved with her two children to Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, about 60 miles outside the city, where she shares a house and child-rearing duties with an old friend. MacAlister is one of very few female Black policewomen, either in her new hometown or in recent American detective fiction. These books are very well-written. The characters have real depth. Marti's struggles to help her children come to grips with the loss of their father while she rebuilds her life in a new town with new, and not always sympathetic, colleagues, are believable and very moving. Eleanor Taylor Bland's books offer a welcome alternative to the standard cynical, white, male milieu of traditional police procedurals.

REVIEWS

Done Wrong :

From Kirkus Reviews, 06/15/95:

A Chicago narcotics cop's suspiciously fatal fall from the roof of a parking garage rips open Marti MacAlister's three-year- old wounds of grieving for her own husband a colleague of Julian Cantor's who supposedly ate his gun in a Chicago cemetery. Now, even though she's made a new life for her family in suburban Lincoln Prairie, Marti's driven to return to the city with her partner, Vik Jessenovik, to get the truth about Johnny MacAlister's death. With some unwilling help from a rogue's gallery of druggies, snitches, transvestites, and convicts, the pair piece together the tale of two sorry drug-busts in which big dealer Angelo Estlow walked and $250,000 vanished, presumably into the Man's hands. But as Marti, aided by some coded clues Johnny left behind, finally closes in on his killers, she doesn't know that an assassin named Diablo has targeted all her leading suspects: retired Vice chief Daniel Crosby; his old buddy, Deputy Chief Joe Riordan; drug unit leaders Lt. Frank Murphy and Sgt. Leotha Jamison if they don't trip over themselves betraying each other first. Crisp action sequences, dirty cops, dogged procedural work, quietly telling family scenes: Marti's fourth appearance (Gone Quiet, 1994, etc.) has it all. -- Copyright ©1995, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gone Quiet :

From Kirkus Reviews, 05/14/94:

When you die on a Friday night in Lincoln Prairie, Ill., the way Deacon Henry Hamilton did, your body lies in bed all day Saturday--time enough for the Mt. Gethsemane choir, 40 strong, to traipse through your house on their way home from rehearsal, find your body, console your widow, and wipe out all the forensic evidence. So investigating officers Marti McAlister and Vik Jessenovik (Slow Burn, 1993) don't have anything to go on but gossip about Henry's family, and that's altogether too revealing. Seems that Henry, a pedophile who abused his stepdaughters, Denise and Belle, when they were five years old, may have been getting interested in his daughter Terri Whittaker's four-year-old girl, Zaar--and might have been poisoned or smothered (medical evidence points to both) by a family member with a long memory or a fearful imagination. Incompetent Lt. Howie Sikich, temporarily reassigned from Procurement, presses Marti to arrest her friend Denise, but Vik trumps Howie's high-level contacts long enough to extract a confession from a more unlikely source. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. -

Keep Still :

From Kirkus Reviews, 06/15/96:

What looks at first like a fatal accident and at second like an unassuming, all-in-the-family homicide--elderly widow Sophia Admunds's quiet fall down her basement steps--reveals a much more sinister side when Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, cop Marti MacAlister (Done Wrong, 1995, etc.) and her partners link it to the drowning of teacher's aide Liddy Fields. Liddy had even fewer friends than Sophia had bickering heirs; the one blip on her screen is her attachment to Natalie Beatty, a schoolgirl she couldn't save from being returned to her abusive family eight years ago. Natalie disappeared soon thereafter; the rest of her family has disappeared, too; and now, it seems as if everybody who knew her at Park Elementary--Sophia Admunds, for instance-- may be on the endangered list. A heartfelt indictment of child abuse that's still the most uneventful of Marti's five cases. But the killer's chilling final confession strikes deep. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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