Publication Day Review: EDGE: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller

 

EDGE: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller is the latest read in an excellent police procedural series that began in January 2023 with HIDE. This series by Tracy Clark is one that builds off of the previous books as characters evolve over time. This is not a static series as characters are affected by cases as well as personal life events. As a result, it is strongly recommended to have read the previous books in order before embarking on this complex and very enjoyable read.

 

 

It is spring in Chicago and the season of renewal and yet the rain and the cold make it clear otherwise for Detective Harriet Foster.  Known to all as “Harri," she is on a path at the lakefront thinking about the past, her dead, and scores that have not been settled. The justice she has sought these many months over past events has not happened nor has her ability to deal with those traumas really improved. Her mind is full of turmoil as she walks, putting one foot forward, as she does every day at work, the best she can.  

 

That is until she sees the prone figures in some sort of concrete bowl in the local skate park. The weather has been horrible so partying is not happening. They aren’t moving either and don’t seem to hear her or to be able to respond from where they are behind the locked chain link fence. A fence that somebody from the city should have unlocked hours earlier.

 

Detective Harriet Foster has no choice. She has to get over the fence and check on the people lying motionless. It takes some time to get over that fence and get to them. It is pretty clear that they had been drinking. It is also clear that they each took something and things went very bad. The young man is dead. The young woman snuggled against him is alive, barely, and Detective Foster summons help. She does everything she can to keep her amongst the living during an agonizing long wait for assistance.

 

The young woman who almost died from the drugs as well as hypothermia thanks to the rain, wind, and the cold, is Ella Louise Byrne. A sophomore at the University of Chicago, she also has a business card for Detective Matt Kelley. The same Detective Matt Kelley who is on her team.

 

The same Detective Matt Kelly who is enraged at what happened to his niece. He is willing to burn down his career and the city itself to find those responsible. That means it is up to Detective Harriet Foster and the rest of the team to not only find and arrest those responsible, but to make sure a good cop doesn’t go totally rogue and do something stupid that will ruin his career and maybe his life.

 

Seeking justice has long been a theme throughout this series. It is front and center here in EDGE: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark. If you have not read these excellent police procedurals, you are really missing out.

Strongly recommended.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/418cDyw

 

My reading copy from the publisher, Thomas & Mercer, though NetGalley, months ago with no expectation of a positive review.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Echo by Tracy Clark

Tracy Clark’s latest book is Echo (Thomas & Mercer, December 2024). Set in a Chicago winter, her third story about police detective Harriet Foster has dual story lines of revenge and attempts to right long-ago wrongs.

Foster doesn’t have time to take her coat off one Sunday morning, she is called to a field on the edge of the Belverton College campus, where a student lies dead. Brice Collier is the only son of the fabulously wealthy Sebastian Collier, who owned the nearby house that Brice and some of his friends shared during the scholastic year. Brice was known for his over-the-top Saturday night parties. Because of his father’s money, the college took a hands-off stance on anything affecting Brice, giving him the illusion that he could do or say anything he wanted without repercussion. This time he seems to have gotten too drunk to realize he was outdoors and died of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. The fact that another student living in the same house died in similar circumstances 30 years previously did not escape the police.

While Foster and her new partner, a certified badass named Vera Li, try to pin down the students that were at the party, all of whom are curiously evasive about who was where when, Foster is getting anonymous phone calls. The male caller is making vague threats about revenge for past misdeeds and claims the death of her former partner is a punishment for Foster. Her recently dead partner was determined to have committed suicide, Foster believes she was killed by this anonymous caller. That the police department refused to look into the calls and Foster’s suspicions noticeably strains her relationship with her manager.

Grieving for her dead partner, Foster works relentlessly on the Collier case, finding more and more parallels between the old case and the new, while she tries to identify her anonymous caller and his motives after hours. Her new partner confronts her on the brutal pace she is undertaking and insists on helping identify the anonymous tormentor to remove the distraction from Foster’s life.  

Clark creates clear, well-defined, and credible characters. Even the background members of the Homicide group who don’t get much time on the page stand out distinctly from each other. The old school detective who antagonizes everyone but becomes an emotional basket case over his partner’s sick child is a perfect example. The cold distant Sebastian Collier and his troubleshooter Lange are two more. Vera Li is a fine invention, she and Foster make a powerhouse of a team. I look forward to seeing more of her. As always in Clark’s books, the city of Chicago is a powerful secondary character.

An inventive use of the revenge motive, a crisp narrative, and fine characters. This book made the Washington Post list of best 2024 mysteries for a good reason. Recommended.

 

·         Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (December 3, 2024)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Paperback: ‎364 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1662517327

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1662517327

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3ZsDMf1 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2024 

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Review: Echo: A Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark

It is late February in a very cold and icy Chicago as Echo: A Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark begins. Ice pellets are falling hard this morning and Detective Foster’s day has already been nasty before she gets inside the station and to her desk. She doesn’t even have a chance to take off her coat before her and Detective Symansky are out the door and on the way to a frozen field outside Belverton College.

 

The field, located outside of Hardwicke House has a dead body. The Hardwick House, that goes back to the Gilded Age, is owned by the well-known billionaire, Sebestian Coller. As it happens, the body out in the frozen icy wasteland of a field is his young son, Bruce Collier. He is shirtless, reeking of alcohol and vomit, and clearly has been out in the field for hours.

 

Was it a party gone wrong? Did he get drunk and disoriented, wandered outside into the field, collapse, and freeze to death?

 

Or was it murder?

 

Before long, as readers already know from the first chapter, it most assuredly was murder. Not was it murder, the people behind it are not done yet as they have a score to settle. Detective Harriet Foster and others have a complicated case to work while at the same time Foster is the target of another killer.

 

A complicated and very good police procedural, Echo is the latest installment of an excellent series that started with Hide, followed by Fall. Readers are encouraged to read in order, starting with Hide, as previous events are discussed here.

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3ZxEqIo

 

Aubrey will also be reviewing the book here this coming Monday.

 

My reading copy came from the publisher, Thomas & Mercer, by way of NetGalley, with no expectation of a review.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2024

Review: Fall: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark

 

It has been a few months since Hide as Fall: A Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark begins and things are still rather tense in the squad room. Detective Foster is still haunted by the past and doing her best to function in her minimalist life. She works, goes home, and stares at the tree outside her house, and sleeps. That daily ritual is interrupted by having to attend the resentencing hearing of her son’s killer at the Cook County Courthouse.

Trying to explain to others the depths of her loss is unfathomable. A situation that Marin Shaw is in though in a far different way.

For one thing, her child, Zoe, is still very much alive. But, Marin Shaw has not seen her daughter in three years because former Chicago Alderman Marin Shaw has been in prison. An alcoholic, a lawyer, a wife, a mother, and a progressive Democrat member of the city council, until her personal house of cards came tumbling down. She did the crime and she has done the time though she could have made life far easier if she had rolled over for prosecutors and told all.

She steps out of Logan Correctional one winter’s day, a free woman though her guilt about what she has done is its own form of prison. Thankfully, her lawyer and friend, Charlotte Moore, is awaiting her in order to whisk her away from the prying eyes of the media and others outside the prison walls.

The plan, and it is so not her plan, is for Marin to go to the condo downtown as her husband, Will, and Zoe, wait for the latest round of media scrutiny to fade. Will does not want Marin at the house so as to not stress Zoe. All Marin cares about is Zoe, so she agrees to the situation for now.

At the same time, the story about Marin Shaw is once again a media focus. She wasn’t alone in the corruption, but she stayed quiet. With her publicized release, some of her fellow aldermen are quite concerned as to what she will do now. There are weak links in the corrupt group, as there always are, and threats are made between several group members.

Then the murders begin.

Detective Harriet Foster and Li catch the first murder. Alderman Deanna Leonard is dead on the sixth floor of a Chicago parking garage from what some would conclude was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Much the same way Foster’s old partner committed suicide, also with no warning, sometime back. And while Leonard’s death reminds her of that, there are differences, and Foster is not convinced it was a suicide. The Especially after the medical examiner confirms it definitely was not.

At the time of Shaw’s trial, it was widely speculated that Alderman Leonard was part of the latest crowd of crooks at city hall. But, Shaw never named names. That leaves Foster and Li wondering if Shaw took vengeance? Or was some sort of random killing just hours after Shaw got out. Did she do it? Did she hire someone? Is she involved?

There are many questions to answer and a lot to do.

Fall: A Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark is a complicated novel that works very well in all areas. Multiple storylines with many moving pieces, it is best to have read Hide before reading this book. Character development for Foster and several others continues and builds upon what readers already know and does so while not interfering with the main storyline. Rich, complicated, and full of detail, this second book in the police procedural series is just like the first, a mighty good read.

 

My digital ARC came from the publisher, Thomas & Mercer by way of the NetGalley system with no promise of a review. 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023

Review: Hide: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark

 

Hide: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller by Tracy Clark is the first book in a new police procedural series. It introduces a wide-ranging cast of characters and establishes a ground floor for what one can expect going forward. The solidly good book revolves around Detective Harriet Foster who has been through quite a lot in the last few months and years.

 

A black woman in a heavily male dominated environment, she brings a lot of baggage to her new posting in Chicago. Others have expectations who she is and those expectations may or may not be accurate.   Word of what happened just a few weeks ago has made it to her new boss and colleagues at CPD’s District One. Her new partner, Jim Lonergan, appears to be your classic old school, non-politically correct cop straight out of Hollywood casting. Like the old rickety desk she is assigned, he is not fixable, so the two clash almost from the second they lay eyes on each other. Things are wrong from almost the get go, but that does not matter as they have a body this Monday morning.

 

It is also going to be a very high-profile case as the body was dumped on the Riverwalk. Part of the nearby legendary, Magnificent Mile, the body has a lot of witnesses. Many of those same witnesses have thoughts about how quickly police responded to the scene as Lonergan and Foster arrive to work the case. The murder and subsequent dumping of the body in a very public place means the pressure is on from all sides to solve the case.

 

It also won’t be the last body with the same signature style.

 

What follows is a complex and very enjoyable read. Marketed as a thriller, it comes across to this reader as a police procedural. Regardless of the marketing label, Foster, as well as nearly everyone in the read, are complex. The focus is on Foster, but the secondary characters get extensive details about themselves as well. None of the characters are simple as even Jim Lonergan is a bit more complex than it first appears.

 

Then there is the complexity of the case as the read shifts to follow other characters besides Harriet Foster. Plenty of action, misdirection, and a hunt for a killer drive Hide: A Detective Harriet Foster Thriller forward at a steady pace. The very good read is well worth your time.

The second book in the series, Fall, is currently scheduled to come out on December 5^th.

Make sure you check out Lesa Holstine’s far more detailed review from last December on her site here. 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3Z6Gzcq

 

My paperback reading copy came from the Park Forest Branch of the Dallas Public Library System.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023

Lesa's Book Critiques: HIDE BY TRACY CLARK

 Lesa's Book Critiques: HIDE BY TRACY CLARK