NYPD Red 2

NYPD Red 2 is a thriller by James Patterson, published in 2014. It belongs to a sequence about NYPD Red, the task force that handles the most extreme crimes in the most extreme city in America.

The case at the centre of the book is a vigilante serial killer working through people whose crimes were never punished. The number of victims grows, and a good part of the city secretly applauds the idea of justice won at any price, which makes the investigation a public relations problem as well as a police one.

Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald are put on the case when a woman of vast wealth and even greater connections disappears. Their task is to establish what is actually behind the killer's rampage, because the version of the story the public has been given is more comfortable than the truth is likely to be.

The detectives have to work a case that the public is half in favour of, which means the usual cooperation is not available to them. What they establish about the killer has to be worth more than the version people would prefer to believe.