Crime Done Penultimate Pass: mystery suspense thriller books

By Ally Baker

Philadelphia…a city seething with crime, grit, and a preponderance of other things that drive Officer Koffo completely insane. With a terrorist bomber on the loose, there's only one man who can stop him. The stubborn, macho, and secretly softhearted Officer Koffo. As the relentless winter bears down on the city of brotherly love, Koffo must investigate a case that could have deadly consequences…but what happens when what seemed to be a simple domestic abuse case offers a surprising lead?

Join Officer Koffo and his buddy Detective Bolear on this high stakes chase through the criminal underworld of Philadelphia in this suspenseful and hilarious new crime thriller. Will the rogue bomber terrorizing the city ever be caught? There's only one way to find out…

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Heirs Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386283553

Book preview

Chapter One

The Winter of My Discontent

That was the winter of furry boots and terrorist bombings.

Detective Reggie Koffo like the fuzzy boots on the women as they walked through Philadelphia’s snow-covered streets. Reggie never understood fashion but he liked the way the wetness clung to the synthetic fur on the designer footwear, made for girls who’s little, manicured toes got chilly in the cold.

Detective Reggie Macho Koffo was less fond of the bombings. So far, the Special Crimes Unit (S.C.U) of the Philadelphia Police Department (P.P.D) had managed to keep news that the City of Brotherly Love had a serial bomber on the loose away from the press. This was because none of the explosions had been big enough or happened in populated enough areas to injure anybody or attract the attention of anybody but a few frightened night watchmen.

Improvised explosive devices, they were called. The dreaded I.E.D’s. Reggie thought of them all the time. They were all he saw. Garbage can out of place? It must be wired to blow, he thought. New pothole in the road? I.E.D went off last night, he assumed. Suspicious looking brown skinned man on the bus? Check him for a bomb vest, but do it cautiously, he’d say in his head, wanting to scream it out loud.

Bombs and fuzzy fashion boots everywhere.

He sometimes felt as though he was caught in a web of silliness and danger; women in girlish apparel to ward off the cold and his team in bomb disposal suits.

He felt like he was trapped between dumbness and death, and that at any time, one or the other would reach out and grab him by the scruff of his neck and shake him until he laughed or cried until he died.

When that horrible season began, though, he was nowhere near women in Ugg Boots or homemade bombs.

Detective Koffo jogged through the Germantown, an older, working-class neighborhood in Philly. The leaves were just turning colors and a fine spray of autumn mist was cooling his face as got in his morning cardio workout.

He kept one eye on the road ahead, looking for cars. He kept one eye on the road below, watching out for Germantown’s ubiquitous potholes.

And, because he was a detective with twenty years of experience, he somehow kept one eye looking behind him. When you don’t have a partner to watch your back, you’ve got to watch your own.

The detective had recently thrown his Nike running shoes in the trash and switched to Under Armor’s new athletic line. Although he lived in Philadelphia, Reggie had no loyalty to the local basketball team. The 76’ers were historically atrocious. They never won.

And Det. Reggie Koffo supported winners.

The Golden State Warriors, northern California’s new B-Ball powerhouse, were winners. Just like him. He solved cases in less than forty eight hours; they beat opponents by forty eight points. He shot perps, they shot threes.

Detective Koffo hoped that the coming winter wouldn’t be as bad as last year’s. His new shoes clung to the pavement like claws and he knew he’d be running in much worse weather than this, through the coming season, through the Atlantic winds and the sleet and the snow.

They’d been through a rough winter, that winter prior. Philadelphia gets plenty of snow but it is rarely a city crippled by winter.

The last of the snow would be gone by the end of February but this past winter the piles had lingered in the parking lots where it had been plowed and piled up until mid-April. The citizens had gone stir-crazy and gotten cabin fever and the violent crime rate had skyrocketed as housebound families took out their mounting aggressions on one another.

Human beings weren’t meant to be cooped up like chickens in a blizzard.

There were beautiful sights to be had in this part of Philadelphia. The city itself, he thought, was beautiful and not deserving of its reputation for decay and gritty urban drama.

Sure, there was crime, vice, and violence. But not tonight, and not on these streets. No, not on these streets; these streets were finally clear.

As Reggie ran through the November rain, he thought about his life, he thought about work, but he never thought about love. Everything and anything occupied his ravenous, detective’s mind as it leaped from one thread to another. He thought about the life he’d led, the cases he’d solved, the children whose parents he’d helped, the children whose parents he’d sent to jail.

He thought about the kids of the criminals less.

Det. Koffo was worried about going soft. To harden himself against the grim reality of the job (hell, of the world) he ran snatches of his life, like snapshots frozen in time, through the slideshow in his mind.

He’d been shot in an alley, like Batman’s parents. He thought of the man who shot him, a demented monster named Marty Matazena, and how he’d felt when the killer’s bullet slammed into his shoulder like a sledgehammer.

He thought of how it had felt to smash Matazena’s head with the manhole cover, a heavy metal disc that Reggie should’ve never been able to life with

just one arm. He had, somehow, and he’d brought it crashing down on the man’s face with a sickening splat. He’d wanted to kill the criminal,