Never Kill a Friend

Detective Shelley Krieg has lived her entire life in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC. At six-foot-four, she's the giantess of DC Metroâa tough cop who's paid her dues on her long path to becoming a detective in the city she loves. She can get a confession out of anyone. And she always plays by the rules. But when Rafael Hooks is arrested for killing his brother, all the rules change. Shelley finds herself not only fighting the system but also questioning her relationships with her co-workers, her closest friends, and even her partner, Kent Bellotti. It seems like an open-and-shut case: Raffi confesses to murdering his drug-dealing brother. But nothing is as it seems. Each time Shelley finds evidence to exonerate Raffi, new evidence arises to confirm his guilt. Fingerprints tying Raffi to multiple murders in both DC and neighboring Maryland suddenly appear out of thin air. And on his first night in lock-up, Raffi is nearly killed. With no allies left at DC Metro, Shelley turns to her estranged friend Yasmira Turner for help. Together Shelley and Mira uncover a web of deceit and corruption that links a Russian assassin, a high-paid DC call girl, and an urban Robin Hood who renovates his crack houses before donating them to the poor.Never Kill a Friendis a taut, suspenseful novel of conflicting loyalties, friends found and lost, and power in the wrong hands. It is a finely wrought tale of one woman's quest to stay true to herself and to do the right thing for an innocent man.