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Flame Out    by M. P. Cooley Amazon.com order for
Flame Out
by M. P. Cooley
Order:  USA  Can
William Morrow, 2015 (2015)
Hardcover, CD, e-Book
* * *   Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth

Ex-FBI agent June Lyons is now a police officer in Hopewell Falls, New York. Hopewell Falls is full of abandoned factories and warehouses that line the Mohawk River. A situation like this often encourages problems. As June finds, to her dismay, when a fire breaks out in one of the buildings. Before the building burns down to the sub-basement, June rescues a badly burned woman. The woman, in a coma, cannot be identified, or any clue found as to how she got there.

Thirty years ago, June's father had arrested the building's owner for killing his wife and child! The owner, Bernie Lawler, has spent all that time incarcerated in a local prison. The bodies were never discovered but there was enough bloody evidence to convict the man.

June and her partner discover a woman's body sealed in a barrel in the burned out building. Turns out, it wasn't Lawler’s wife, but now the question is who could this soul sealed in a barrel be? Lawler's sister is a lawyer and has dedicated her life to proving her brother innocent of the charges that put him in jail.

With the technology available today, new facts present themselves, pointing to Lawler's innocence. However, he had not been pure white in his dealings. Now the plot thickens. Favorably for June and her old partner in the FBI, Agent Hale Bascom, who find themselves embroiled in an old case and the facts brought to light in the new investigation.

Flame Out by M.P. Cooley is the second of this newcomer's novels, the first being Ice Shear. I have not read the latter, but if it is as good as Flame Out, it is another book to put on your must-read list.

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