From the March/April edition of Suspense Magazine:
“In her debut novel Maldonado pulls from her personal experience as a former cop to provide readers with a highly entertaining police procedural—a thriller with more than a touch of reality, pulled from today’s headlines.
Detective Veranda Cruz, a Phoenix Police Drug Enforcement Agent and a first-generation Phoenician, is proud of her family’s heritage and her parents’ successful restaurant business in Arizona’s largest city. Her family is just as proud of her rise to power as task force leader. When her investigation into Bartolo Villalobos’s cartel, one of Mexico’s largest crime families, becomes part of her focus the heat is turned up, literally, and the bad guys come after her family, burning their restaurant to the ground.
This personal attack just serves as a catalyst for Cruz to return the favor. Once she realizes there is a mole in the corridors of the police department, she puts her faith in an outsider—arson investigator, Cole Anderson—who is soon kindling a flame for the pretty detective. As the intensity increases, a link between the families emerge that might just flip the investigation on its ear and challenges everything Cruz ever knew to be true.
Hang on tight for the ride of a lifetime across Southern Arizona as Maldonado rises to her written challenge to entertain, enthrall and engage readers in this high-octane thriller.”
Reviewed by Mark P. Sadler, Suspense Magazine (www.suspensemagazine.com)
