The third book in Spokane author Frank Zafiro's River City crime series, "Beneath a Weeping Sky", approaches the sensitive topic of sexual assault from a variety of perspectives while providing more of the well-crafted police procedural drama his fans know and love.
A serial rapist is on the loose in River City and he keeps getting more daring and more violent. Detective John Tower, featured in "Heroes Often Fail" and some of the short stories in the anthology "Dead Even", is the lead investigator on the case. With some help from familiar faces from the River City Police Department's graveyard shift and Renee the wise and all-knowing crime analyst, Tower is trying to find him before he hurts more women.
The rapist usually attacks women when they are alone in local parks. Officer Katie MacLeod is tasked with working as a decoy as part of an ongoing effort to catch him in the act. This assignment becomes increasingly difficult for her as she keeps reliving a time when she was raped by a guy she knew in college.
It probably doesn't help that she has to rely on Officers "Sully" O'Sullivan and Battaglia for backup. Their constant stream of goofy banter provides some much needed comedy relief in an otherwise very intense story, but at the same time they unintentionally drive MacLeod crazy while she is trying to deal with complicated feelings. They also have a tendency to make minor mistakes that create more tension as the rapist keeps managing to avoid capture.
On the other hand, MacLeod has Officer Thomas Chisolm in her corner. Chisolm continues to be the rock the others rely on even as he torments himself with memories of a woman he feels like he could have done more to help while he was serving in Vietnam.
Eventually, they get some solid leads on the rapist, but not before MacLeod suffers a lot both physically and emotionally. And not before Tower and Chisolm have to sort out their own feelings that relate to wanting to protect women from sexual predators.
Zafiro is a captain in the Spokane Police Department with over 18 years of law enforcement experience. That may help explain why he does such a good job of exploring how the Rainy Day Rapist's victims deal with their assaults in their own unique ways and why one woman who got away mostly unscathed has such a hard time convincing herself to go to the police.
One aspect of the story that may not work for everybody is that Zafiro tries to get into the head of his rapist character and explain why his villain does the things he does. Readers won't sympathize with him at all, but Zafiro encourages people to think about things like how contributing factors such as abusive parents might be partly to blame for his actions. Those parts of the book raise some uncomfortable moral and ethical questions.
River City is a fictionalized, thinly disguised version of Spokane. Seeing so many familiar locations and street names in one of Zafiro's books is normally really fun for me. This time, it made me think about how Spokane has been plagued by several serial rapists over the years and how many women in our area have experienced something similar to what MacLeod and the rapist's victims lived through in this book.
A reader wouldn't have to be from Spokane to appreciate Zafiro's message, but things like knowing where the real Sacred Heart Medical Center is help drive home that women in our city are at more risk than we may want to admit to ourselves.
"Beneath a Weeping Sky" will make more sense to people who read "Heroes Often Fail" first, because the characters are still dealing with several things that happened in the previous book even though it is about a year later. But that knowledge isn't required to follow the main story or appreciate the thoughtful way Zafiro writes about some really unpleasant stuff.
This book isn't necessarily the most enjoyable installment in the River City series, but it may be the most important.
"Beneath a Weeping Sky" is available now from Spokane publisher Gray Dog Press. It is also included with the rest of the River City crime novels and "Dead Even" in the Frank Zafiro Collection. The ebook edition is available from Amazon and as part of a special bundle collection called "Trouble in River City."
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