BOOKS

Bone Factory

The aging riverboat casinos and decrepit cut-rate hotels that line the dark waters running through downtown Booth City reveal the seething underbelly of a Midwestern city down on its luck. Booth is filled with a collection of lonely souls looking for one last shot at happiness in what seems the most unlikely place on earth. Instead they're trapped in a never-ending cycle of false hope and true despair, temporary sobriety and permanent desolation.

Two of these souls, homicide cops Eliza Ochoa and Ike Horner, are on the scene of a body dump in a downtown park, crouching over the freezing corpse of another dead working girl. She's been cut up in all the most delicate places, and so it's perhaps understandable that Ike and Eliza at first miss the most telling part of this routine Booth City morning: she isn't actually female.

As the two detectives go over the last days of a young prostitute's life, pushed more by dogged determination than any super sleuthing powers, the facts lead them deep into a quickly unraveling conspiracy that stretches from the darkest holes in Booth to the fringes of its most influential families. As the investigation hurtles toward its violent and startling conclusion, Ike and Eliza remain intent on proving, perhaps only to themselves and at great personal cost, that justice is indeed possible in Booth City.

| Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | Book Sense |

Reviews of Bone Factory:

In used-up Booth City, there's a place where used-up bodies routinely get dumped, so what makes this corpse different? For starters, the young prostitute was not, as the cops had supposed, female. Augmented breasts misled them-that, plus the brutal knife-work. Okay, so it was a dead transvestite the police were dealing with, so what? To veteran homicide detectives like Eliza Ochoa and Ike Gorman, that news was hardly earth-shaking. Not in Booth City, where "trannies" were as common as corruption in a town that had long since lost all sense of itself as worthwhile. No, what was different, truly different, was that this poor soul turned out to have connections, links to people with clout. One of them, it seems, wanted her dead. But why? The question intrigued Ochoa and Gorman, good cops to the end. Undeterred by obstacles, personal and otherwise, they push their investigation. For a while it gathers speed before bogging down, stymied in part by bureaucracy. As the detectives close in, they learn first hand just how savage a tactician the cunning killer can be. Sidor, as he demonstrated in his debut (Skin River, 2004), is a prince of darkness, steeped in the noir tradition and not giving an inch. That said, he is also bountifully talented. -- Kirkus Reviews

Sidor proved in his well-received first novel, Skin River (2004), that he knows a thing or two about deviant human behavior. Now he delivers an equally laudable mystery about two homicide detectives, set in the fictional midwestern town of Booth City, that delves even deeper into the darker reaches of the criminal mind. The police officers make an intriguing pair: Ike Horner, a large black man, has some serious physical problems, which he tries to hide; Eliza Ochoa has moved away from her poor Latino family and doesn't want to be responsible for her partner's health. When they check out the murder of a prostitute in a park, they're surprised to find that the dead woman is actually a transvestite male, who worked under the name of Josine. Sidor's subjects may be grisly, but his writing style is often poetic. "This had been a fine place once, a holiday destination rather than a full-stop dead end," Ike says about the ghastly hotel where Josine lived. The eulogy also covers the once beautiful Booth City, where several of the richest families are involved in some very nasty crimes. Agent, Ann Collette. -- Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Eliza Ochoa and Ike Horner are homicide detectives in Booth City, a deteriorating Rust Belt city in which hope is a forgotten concept. The latest victim is a hooker mutilated so badly that the usually savvy pair initially misses the obvious: the vic is a male. The investigation leads to Booth City's most influential family and its twisted, dilettante son, and it also forces Eliza to confront her father, a bent cop now serving time in the penitentiary. Ike is dealing with his own demons: diabetes, a bad ticker, and impending retirement, none of which he chooses to face. The more they investigate, the more they are drawn into the twisted world of drugs, fetishistic transsexuality, and murder as a release from boredom. Booth City--introduced by Sidor in the critically praised Skin River (2004)--is as frightening as the Sin City portrayed in Frank Miller's graphic novels. The sun never shines, the ubiquitous shadows cloak despair, and love never has a chance. The conclusion is one of the most harrowing in recent memory. -- Booklist Wes Lukowsky Copyright © American Library Association.