Free again from the author('s republishing consortium) @
Kobo & thence price-matched in selected regional
Amazon stores (not currently available to Canadians, but if it stays free long enough, sometimes they get matched):
The Kindness of Strangers by Edgar Award-winner Julie Smith (
SYKM,
Wikipedia), 6th in her Skip Langdon mystery series (the one which won her said award) starring the eponymous New Orleans cop, originally out from Ballantine in 1996.
A MADMAN, A COP OBSESSED, AND A WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE LOVE AFFAIR…
Politics makes the strangest bedfellows of all and in New Orleans, a psychopath’s running for mayor. Not just the usual harmless megalomaniac—a murderer and a monster. His supporters and a good proportion of would-be voters think he’s just a kindly preacher-man and handily crucify anyone who says otherwise. Enter Detective Skip Langdon, who met the Rev. Errol Jacomine on a case, finds him pretty much the personification of evil, and can point to a pile of corpses to prove it.
But Langdon’s fresh out of street cred. On administrative leave after shooting someone, she’s become the Cassandra of the police department—everything she says gets put down to paranoia. So finding the proof to discredit Jacomine becomes her obsession until he kidnaps a couple of kids she cares about—and then it turns into a mission from hell.
Langdon has to bull her way through a hurricane to find the small army of Jacomine’s thugs who’ve got 15-year-old Sheila, the closest thing she has to a niece, and Sheila’s friend, who’s having the mother of inappropriate love affairs—with someone dangerously close to Jacomine.