Lights Out Summer: A Coleridge Taylor Mystery

In the spring of 1977, with the Son of Sam killings already in full swing, a young black woman is murdered in her Queens apartment the same evening as one of the serial killer's victims. While nearly every crime reporter in New York is chasing Son of Sam leads, Coleridge Taylor instead pursues this case of Martha Gibson, a recent college graduate who lost her job after refusing her boss's sexual advances and was forced to take a job as a maid for a wealthy Park Avenue family. Using actual headlines from the Son of Sam coverage as a way to highlight the passing of time and the less glamorous footwork involved in investigating a story, the novel works best when it focuses on Coleridge's trial-and-error investigation of Martha's death and the struggle to keep a case open as suspects die and police shift their focus elsewhere. In his fourth series mystery (after A Black Sail), former journalist Zahradnik does an excellent job capturing this moment in time for New York's print media, when several papers were folding and Rupert Murdoch was coming on the scene with his acquisition of the New York Post.