This was another book from Boedeker who seems to have a phobia about writing posts.
Parker’s cop/sleuth is Charlie Hood. (This guy chooses great names as in Hood for a cop and Laws for one of the bad guys.) Hood had a recent encounter that led him turning a rogue cop over to Internal Affairs, and as a result, he has chosen to leave the desired detective unit at the L.A. Sheriff’s Department (as opposed to LAPD), and take a transfer to the Antelope Valley, a place where he can be out of sight and out of mind by the main body of the department. Instead of being a detective, he’s back on patrol with a partner. The Renegades is a reference to a prior group of cops that had been good cops that were eventually turned by a couple bad guys, so the group was banned from further existence by the department. There are two primary bad guys in this one, an officer, Terry Laws, and a reserve officer, Coleman Draper. Draper is the one who wants to reestablish the Renegades, and he draws Laws into a deal in which they take over the delivery of substantial amounts of cash to a drug lord in Baja. To do that, they have to take the cash south of the border every Friday, but it nets each one of them about $7k for each trip. So, there is the tension between good cops trying to do bad things and bad cops trying to look okay and keep their side job going. There are tensions within each group as Hood is not always sure who he can trust and is not always ready to divulge what he knows to his superiors. You’ll have to read about the conflicts within the drug cartel and their doubts about their delivery boys. Of course, there is a beautiful DA with whom Hood interacts, and there are some other very interesting peripheral characters, some of whom float back and forth between the good and bad sides of the story. The ending was very well written – I did not see the final twists coming. This one is a good distraction – not great literature, but worth the read.
WC Don
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