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End of Watch

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Lt. L.A. Franco from the LAPD has been going to AA and attending meetings faithfully. As part of the program, she's decided to put closure to the death of her mother. She goes to NYC to visit her mother's grave only to find someone has been placing flowers and candles on her father's grave.

Her father was killed by a mugger when she was a little girl and they were returning from the store. Franco has been carrying this around with her for 36 years. Naturally, she's surprised since she has no family left who would be leaving the homage.

Franco takes the candle to the NYCPD in hopes they can get fingerprints off the candle. Her's where she meets Detective Annie Silvester and they clash right off the bat.

But Franco isn't leaving until she figures out what is going on. She does a stake out of the cemetery until the suspect appears and Franco learns the story.

Prior to going to NYC, she wrote a letter to Gail, her former partner, telling her how sorry she was and that she still loved her. Gail calls and comes over to see her. Gail is pissed off, but is understanding.

Gail just happens to be in NYC for a conference and they meet up and have dinner a couple of times. They seem to be patching up the bad parts or at least coming to an understanding.

When all loose ends are tied up except one, Franco returns to LA and work. Only to find the answer to the 36 year old puzzle sitting in her back yard and the pieces are fitting together for she and Gail, too.

LAPD Lieutenant L.A. Franco takes a weekend trip to New York on personal business. It shouldn't be hard to handle, just a quick trip to close the door on old memories. It was probably pointless to try tying up loose ends left dangling for a few decades, but still, she'd make the attempt.
Keeping in touch with her sponsor, reconnecting with the lover she had left, reopening a murder investigation into her father's death, attending AA meetings, resisting the siren call to drink, reassessing her life as a sober person, all this is more than enough to deal with, even for someone accustomed to facing personal issues. Detective Franco is decidedly not accustomed to handling such things. She is comfortable with drowning everything in a haze of booze. It would be easy to walk away, go back home to her job, and leave new evidence she uncovers in the capable hands of the New York detective Annie Silvester. She could do this, and turn her concentration to staying sober and rebuilding relationships and doing her job with a clear head. For a woman taking baby steps in a new landscape, this would be the wise course, the safe one. Even her sponsor advises her to avoid stress that might make it too easy to pick up a drink again, to take things nice and slow and stay safe.
Frank is keeping a journal, and these entries let us see inside her as she navigates strange new territory, as she is buffeted by emotions like guilt, grief, and joy as she awakens to the world unfiltered through alcohol. Baby steps aren't really her style. Kinder and gentler aren't either. Hard charging and hard living, hard in a harsh world, that's how Frank gets through. Trying to construct a belief in a higher power amid the ugliness she lives and works in isn't an easy or comfortable task for her. She struggles with this step in the recovery process. Frank can't reconcile the concept of a God who could allow such indecent and horrible things to happen. Taking responsibility for her own participation in the ugliness, yes, but imagining that a benevolent supreme being could be in charge of even the depths of human nastiness, the violence and seemingly unending acts of unimaginable pain and meanness, this she can't understand.
Putting things right. That's what she does, that's what she wants.
This is a murder mystery. It is also a story about loss and recovery and making amends, and accepting that sometimes, it may not be possible.
This is the fifth in the extraordinary Detective Franco series, though it can be read as a stand alone. Detective Franco, called Frank by everyone, is forty five years old. She is battle scarred and weary. Think gritty realism, Raymond Chandleresque film noir, hard boiled, that kind of weary and worn. Obsessed with work and little else, she has hit bottom and begun to climb her way back up out of the bottle. Two months of shaky sobriety leave her little skill in dealing with sensations and emotions she had numbed out of existence with decades of drinking. One of the twelve steps of the AA program is to make amends, accept responsibility for what she's done and apologize. She decides to begin at the beginning, taking a weekend to fly to New York and visit her parents' graves.
Allowing emotion to surface is new to her. At times moved to tears, when she kneels at the cemetery, her cop's eyes slowly take in the facts as if at a crime scene to block out the stark facts of her parents' deaths. Her father had been murdered thirty five years ago, while she stood and watched as a [...] girl. Her mother had died alone, abandoned when Frank left for California at age eighteen.
Baxter Clare has real talent. Whether it's the slide back into New York accents and rhythms, or the slide back into memories, or the fall into old habits and building new ones, each page will bring the reader a feast. The rapport between the two detectives, the awkward, tentative contacts with her lover Gail, the return to the familiar streets of Los Angeles and the peculiar pace and sounds of her territory, a sure eye and expert skill reveal the changing but still very recognizable character of Franco, at the doorway to new options, new beginnings, with old baggage, old wounds and scars that may never heal or fade.
In the four previous novels, Franco was on a downward spiral, bound to end up dead or her career destroyed, certainly. Reading these novels is like watching a car accident in slow motion, sickly fascinating, but the voyeur is utterly unable to look away. The reader feels like a helpless witness to Franco's self destruction, moved by the waste of the life and talent of this self-made woman, but feeling pulled along on the ride, knowing there could be only one outcome. One can only wait and see just how far the singularly focused detective will sink. Franco has an enormous capacity for sabotaging herself.
Frank also has a lot of work to do. Her tenuous hold on each day's sobriety is sorely tested. She could begin rebuilding her life by trying to resurrect the relationship she deliberately destroyed, or with expiating any number of past indiscretions and sins. Instead, she starts with a thirty-five-year-old homicide, a very cold trail, one with little promise of justice after being so long buried.

I've enjoyed all books in the "Franco" series, the characters jump off the page so full of life and real it's like they are people I've known and lived with. Baxter Clare takes the readers into all sides of police work and life and does it with such heart that there are few characters that you don't appreciate. My hope is that "End of Watch" is not end of series, but a jumping off place for Lt Franco's "... Next Shift..."