Crazy Eights — Elizabeth Gunn

THE BLIND SIDE OF JUSTICE

It's a bad blow for Jake Hines when a killer is found not guilty due to a technicality -- and Jake himself is blamed for fouling up Benny Niemeyer's airtight conviction. But before the Rutherford, Minnesota, chief of detectives can work up a new angle to nail this bad seed who kidnapped and murdered an upstanding local woman, Benny is found with his head bashed in at a skateboard park. It would seem, in an odd twist, that justice has been served. But Jake doesn't quite agree.

His search for links to Benny's killer takes him on a trail of drugs that reaches from the city's wealthiest neighborhoods to the poorest, where strange connections make stranger bedfellows and where a case of murder leads to a complex crime with death the only way out.