Murder by the Book

The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace and terminus of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he's been a homicide detective, one of LA's best. He knows the rules, playing them perhaps better than anyone while understanding the reality of a justice system that doesn't always work, that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He's a deeply unhappy, possibly suicidal man, divorced from a wife he still adores and separated from a ten-year-old daughter for whom he'd readily die.McGrath is called to a crime scene - a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city's less than inviting neighborhoods, a seemingly routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman's son is LA's biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer.Making the wrongt choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grade, and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through many identities of corrupt Los Angeles.In Ian Mcgrath, Rayner has dreated a sympathetic everyman, who becomes both victim and victor. Set against a bleak cityscape, Murder Book is a dark, violent and sexy thriller that is impssible to put down.