Book Review: Under the Color of Law by Michael McGarrity

Published in 2001. Kevin Kerney has just taken over as police chief in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but the book begins with Officer Alonso Herrera doing a welfare check on a local well-to-do resident, Phyllis Terrell. She was supposed to fly to Washington, D.C. this morning but never showed up. He finds her dead and calls it in. When detectives arrive, he backs off and handles crowd control, all that he wants to do. Kerney isn’t pleased with his handling of the situation and finds him another job off the streets, even though he knows the repercussions. Officer Herrera has some high-level connections.

Shortly after this murder, another one occurs at a local religious college. Father Mitchell was found dead and no one knows why. At this point, Kerney considers both cases to be difficult to solve homicide cases until the FBI shows up, unexpectedly and takes over the Terrell murder case because the woman is married to an ambassador. The lead FBI agent is a man by the name of Charlie Perry, well known to Kerney from a previous case. Kerney suspects something more is going on.

Interesting story, involving high tech and national security. Kerney proves to be tenacious, not the small-town cop that everyone was hoping for. I enjoyed reading this story and meeting Chief Kerney and his wife, Sara Brannon, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, attending the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. On a personal note, I, too, am a graduate of the college even though I was in the Navy.

The author has written twelve other books and has received a number of awards, so I’ll keep an eye out for them.