The Tip Line

DEBUT Thirtysomething Virginia is eager to find a husband, so she takes a job answering the tip line for the Suffolk County PD—a lot of the cops are eligible bachelors, she’s the only attractive single woman in the station. There an anonymous caller tips her off to the bodies of four dead sex workers near a beach. Then she gets the attention of the police chief, a hunk with a reputation for pushing boundaries, not just at work but in his personal life. Alcohol, coke, sex—their life together heats up. Virginia narrates the story, and she’s perpetually abandoning what’s happening now for her fantasies of how things could be in the future. Then she returns to reality, and the novel moves a step forward. But doubts build: the killer could be a policeman, and the caller implicates her lover. The ending is a shocker, the best part of an otherwise too slow tale.