‘The Bitter Season’: Fifth book in detective series just gets better

'No heroes in this story,” opines Nikki Liska. 'Just humans, good bad and otherwise.”

'The world's overrun with them,” parries Sam Kovac. 'It's our job to sort them out.”

The veteran Minneapolis homicide detective partners have split up in Tami Hoag's 'The Bitter Season” (Dutton, $28, 408 pages). Seeking more regular hours and more time with her fast-growing sons, Liska has transferred to a new cold case squad.

Her first task is solving the 25-year-old murder of a sex crimes detective that nobody else seems to really want solved, most notably the victim's family. Hoag skillfully entwines that cold case with the sensational current one Kovac is working as the city teeters on the precipice of another long Minnesota winter.

An East Asia history professor and his wife have been brutally slain in their home, sliced and diced with the very exotic weapons he'd displayed on his walls. Kovac works seemingly around the clock on this case, while Liska tries not to with hers.

The overriding theme that ties them together involves the underbelly of family life - the gut-wrenching damage people can inflict on one another, either passively or aggressively, and the ensuing consequences. And Hoag lays it all out there in graphic detail in a thoroughly suspenseful psychological thriller that manages to stay one step ahead of the reader.

The fifth book in the Liska-Kovac series, 'The Bitter Season” manages to continue the exploration of the detectives' tight bond even as they mostly work apart. Kovac toils under intense media coverage that has the city on edge. Out of the spotlight, Liska doggedly pursues new avenues of investigation that people close to her case don't want opened. Yet the threads of connection continue between the detectives and their cases as Hoag weaves a narrative that grows more compelling with each plot development.

There's a visceral quality to Hoag's prose that propels and enhances her storytelling. It's on prominent display here in a novel that easily stands alone despite its rotation in a series. If you read this one first, however, I predict you have four books in your immediate reading future.