2nd Chance

Seems the idea behind this story is that women can be brave and smart cops as well as men. Set in California, this police detective suspense and thriller story is positive about interracial love and promotes the belief that the good guys win in the end, with the climactic gunning down of a mad killer Stanford student who had taken on the hateful role of his father and decided to start killing black people shortly after his father finished his 20-year prison term.

The brave and smart cop is Lt. Lindsay Boxer whose dad Martin, also a cop, had absconded from home 22 years before. The period appears to be the 1990s. The story starts with a shooting at a black church, with one little 11-year-old black girl targeted and killed. Her uncle was a cop. Weeks before an elderly black widow, whose husband had been a cop, had been found hanging from a rope in a basement some town nearby and now it turns out she had been lynched by a white man with a tattoo. As Lindsay is trying to unravel these related killings, the mad man strikes again, this time luring a black cop to an ambush and shooting him dead. The search for “Chimera” escalates, the name coming from symbols linked to the killer, of a lion-goat-headed monster with the tail of a snake. Next in line to die is the black police chief Mercer, Lindsay’s boss. A suspect is finally found, Frank Coombs, an ex-cop. Then Lindsay’s run-away dad shows up, and it turns out he and Coombs were together the night Coombs strangled a black teenager, but while Coombs was punished no one mentioned Boxer’s name. Coombs had written threatening mail to Martin on being released and so Martin had come back to settle scores.

Now Coombs through his son was taking revenge for his fall and imprisonment, on black cops and their friends and relations. When Coombs Snr was finally gunned down as he tried to kill Lindsay, Lindsay noticed that there were no tattoos on him. The case that was then officially thought closed had to be reopened, especially after the real killer Coombs Jnr next went shooting at Cindy, one of Lindsay’s friends that was celebrating the end of the case with her black male friend. It was an overlooked evidence that finally nailed Coombs Jnr, a shooter’s price trophy found in his father’s hotel room bearing his own initials rather than the dad’s.

When the cops went after him at Stanford University, he relived his hateful life and decided to go down still killing. At least five people died before Lindsay braved the odds to go after him atop a bell tower and luckily was able to finally shoot him dead.

Probably the title was to indicate that the heroine’s dad had a second chance of proving his love to the daughter he abandoned 22 years earlier. Or maybe it was the fact that the heroine ended up facing a killer personally for the second time.

June 16, 2015. Review initially written in July, 2014. Novel first published in 2002 by Little, Brown and Company; this Warner Books edition being published in 2003; ISBN 0-446-61279-0.