Book Review: Stealing for a Living

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Stealing for a Living     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Naomi Rand
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Woman Main Character   Police Procedural
Series: Emma Price # 2
HarperCollins, Jun 2003, $23.95, 256 pp.

Though she raises a toddler and is dealing with her teenage son arrested for shoplifting, Emma Price knows that her time in Brooklyn as a single mother feels like heaven compared to her current assignment as a New York City Capital Defender's Office investigator. Emma is to uncover anything that will enable Roland Everett to avoid the obvious death penalty. When his injury compensation claim was rejected Roland retaliated by killing three people.

While Emma struggles with finding anything to help her "client", her lover, Brooklyn Homicide Detective Laurence Solomon, is working on the execution of abortion-rights activist Dr. Eleanor Hammond. Emma knew Eleanor and the woman's family when she was a child, but found nothing redeeming in any of her relationships with any of the Hammond brood so she wonders why she thinks a friend was killed. Though an anti-abortion group claims the credit, Emma believes that this homicide is more domestic in nature and begins her own inquiries.

In some ways STEALING FOR A LIVING is a simplistic look at evil, yet paradoxically that is why the second Emma Price novel (see THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY) is a superb investigative tale as Naomi Rand focuses on the rationalization for murder justifiable in the killers' minds. Fans of urban mysteries will appreciate this novel as Emma struggles on all fronts, whether it is at home in Brooklyn, in her competition with her lover on the Hammond homicide, or failing to find a redeeming quality for a malevolent bigot who she believes deserves death.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner