Just Jennifer

Benefit of the Doubt by Neal Griffin (Forge, May 2015)

After almost killing a suspect, Oakland, California policeman Ben Sawyer returns to the small Wisconsin town where he and his wife Alex grew up, where her father was the chief of police and gave Ben a job and a chance to start again.  Never popular with his colleagues, things get even worse when Lars has a debilitating stroke leaving Ben to the mercies of a new chief and a department Ben feels he can’t trust, for more than one reason.  The Newburg PD is involved in a drug trafficking on the scale Ben would expect in a larger city, making the department ripe for corruption, or so Ben feels.  When a local café/bookstore owner is murdered, Alex is arrested and surely set up for the murder. With only a young Latina copy Tia Suarez on his side, Ben works quickly, though unofficially, as he has been removed from the force, to uncover a plot seventeen years in the making, the truth it tells, if uncovered, could destroy Ben’s family more than imagined.  Authentically detailed with a vulnerable and at times uncertain hero, this debut thriller is carefully plotted and doesn’t give anything up until it is time, making for a fast-paced, though not a quick, as every detail must be absorbed, read.