Runner, by Tracy Clark

On the Anthony Award ballot for Best Novel. This is the fourth in a series about Cass Raines, a Black former cop turned private investigator in Chicago, but it's the first I read. I didn't have any problem jumping in here.

In the dead of winter in Chicago, when everyone is freezing their asses off, Cass is approached by the mother of a runaway teenager to find her daughter. This is immediately complicated by the mother being non-custodial due to drug use, and the daughter having been in foster care. With bulldog-like tenacity, Cass starts knocking on doors...

Runner is a quick, page-turning read, with a little action but mostly just following Cass around as she interviews cops, ex-cops, social workers, foster parents, and street kids. Cass is notable for her kindness - she has some issues stemming from a bad childhood, but she's the opposite of the jaded, alienated, cynical type of PI. You can tell that if she'd made a few different choices, she'd probably have been a social worker herself.

The balance of dealing with dark social issues and skating over them fell just a bit too heavy on the "skating over" side for me. I don't need all the gritty details of human trafficking and child abuse, but if they're going to be a part of the story, I think they need a bit more weight.

This is a good solid mystery and had I read it in high school, when I was extremely into the "female PI" genre, I would have run out and bought the entire series. It's entertaining and atmospheric - you can feel the bitter cold - but unless it's a bad year for mysteries, it's nowhere near a best of the year book.

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