Taking Pity

The New York Times hails David Mark’s police thrillers as “in the honorable tradition of Joseph Wambaugh and Ed McBain.” In Taking Pity, Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy returns for another darkly enthralling installment of this internationally acclaimed series.

It’s been three months since a devastating tragedy ripped Detective Sergeant McAvoy’s life apart. Living alone with his young son in a temporary flat down the road from the charred remains of his family home, McAvoy has been on leave from work, just concentrating on making it through each day. The whole Humberside Police force has also been quietly coping with the loss of a few good officers—but crime in Hull is as relentless as the thunderous skies, and two warring criminal factions have been violently jockeying for position. While Trish Pharaoh and her Serious and Organized Crime Unit clean up bodies and search for answers, McAvoy reemerges to investigate police wrongdoing in a crime that was supposedly solved decades before. It’s meant to be an easy assignment to ease him back into the swing of things, but he is nothing if not thorough—and slowly but surely, evidence that has remained buried for half a century begins to implicate some of the most notorious criminals in Northern England. Frightening and fast-paced, Taking Pity is the latest page-turning installment in the thrilling Detective McAvoy series and by far the most personal one yet.