Million Dollar Men

Salerno knows how to open a procedural. The fire at 187 President Street is staged with real craft — Agnes Rothschild's silent roll call, the acrid smell that 'will hang in the air long after the fire is extinguished,' Angela Bergman's methodical grid work — before the book pivots hard into the three-way call between hidden principals and a volatile hired gun. That scene, with the burner phone left 'embedded in the sheetrock,' is the promise: this isn't just an arson case, it's a contract job with a client structure above the killer, and the reader is told this before the detectives even suspect it. That's a well-built dramatic irony engine, and Salerno lets it run patiently through the McMillan red herring (the fistfight over parking spots, the sealed juvenile arson record, the mysterious Post-it note reading 'McMillan fought with Janssen' appearing from an unknown hand) without over-explaining. The Post-it is a nice structural beat — someone inside the department is steering Reggie, and the reader knows it before Reggie does.

The procedural mechanics are the book's strength: formalin as an accelerant clue that widens into hospitals, funeral homes, and biotech labs; the prison-warden angle; the landlord's missing smoke detectors. Each interrogation (Donnie squirming on the sidewalk, Peter Youngblood's blunt loyalty to his crew) escalates logically. Reggie Jacobs is a well-worn but effective 'good ole boy' foil, and his friction with Bergman gives the investigation team some texture even if it leans on genre stock. This is a book that trusts its plot machinery, and by the end of this excerpt, four separate threads — arson forensics, McMillan's past, the assassin's paymasters, and MJ Fernandez's reluctant entry — are converging with purpose.