Hilary Davidson: Don’t Look Down
This tightly woven thriller-slash-police procedural is set in New York City, and like that city, the pace does not let up, from first page to last. It opens with Jo Greaver, a young cosmetics magnate, on her way to meet her blackmailer, toting a huge bag of cash. To the reader it’s not clear why she’s being blackmailed or who is doing the blackmailing, but it’s very clear something is very wrong and that very definitely something will go wrong.
It does, and it’s a cascade of wrong things, things that string poor Jo up tighter and tighter. There’s a shootout at the blackmail meetup, leaving Jo injured. She attempts to get through her day pretending she’s fine but the pain finally kicks in. There’s a dead, or at least seriously injured person, at the blackmail meetup. And the police have a bag load of evidence tagging Jo as the murderer.